


Carnivorous

by MystiTrinqua



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst and Fluff and Smut, Arena fights, Clones, Dark Shiro (Voltron), Dark!Lance, Eventual Smut, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, I'm Going to Hell, Inspired By Tumblr, Kuro Week 2017, Kuro needs a hug, Lancelot mentions, M/M, Movie Night, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Panic Attacks, Prompts not in day order, Rated for Pidge's language, Sheith mentions, Shiro (Voltron) Has a Clone, The Slightest Of Dub-cons, Unrequited Lance/Shiro
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-27
Updated: 2017-09-26
Packaged: 2018-11-19 21:22:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 39,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11322006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MystiTrinqua/pseuds/MystiTrinqua
Summary: Series of oneshots for Kuro week 2017 AKA a sad Kuro fresh out of Galra hell ft. ya boy Lance, who tries (and succeeds) to kiss him better and put him back together again. Mostly.(1) Madness - Kuro has a process to his days, mostly it involves fear and self-loathing.(2) Injury - Lance starts his time as a prisoner the way Shiro did - in the arena. But he wasn't expecting to find Shiro there too.. or has he?(3) Deception - Lance and Pidge expected it to be a routine prisoner extraction that certainly did not include becoming prisoners themselves. Kuro has something to say about that.(4) Mirror/Reflection - Shiro accepts the reality of having his clone on the same ship. The rest of the team is somewhat more uncomfortable.(5) Identity - Lance has always known who he is. Kuro has always known who he is not. Sometimes they have to meet in the middle.(6) Mind Control - Lance can't have Shiro, he knows that. But there's always the next best thing and he's so eager to please.(7) Nightmares - Kuro isn't the only one who will always have nightmares by the end of the night.(8) Free Day - When Shiro goes missing, Red won't accept Lance... but somehow they can still form Voltron?





	1. Madness

**Author's Note:**

> My eternal thanks to Avery (whatdoyewant.tumblr.com) for screeching excitedly with me about these oneshots until I had the motivation to complete them.  
> Heavily inspired by theprojectava's Kuro AU. I love it and their Kuro/Lance posts so much there are no words.  
> Not beta'd, sorry for any mistakes. I have a tumblr, (mystitrinqua.tumblr.com) come yell in my inbox if you feel so inclined, it always makes my day.
> 
> Suggested listening, if you swing that way:  
> 'Carnivore' and 'My Demons' - Starset.  
> 'Still Here' and 'Can't Sleep Can't Breathe' - Digital Daggers. (Nightcore versions)  
> 'Animal' - Chase Holfelder cover, original by Neon Trees.

“Kuro.” Haggar’s voice is motherly but it drips poison all the same, and he makes himself as small as possible. “Come here.”   
“N-No. _Please.”_  
He presses himself into the furthest corner of the cell they pen him in and closes his eyes, curling in on himself in a movement so human he’d almost be surprised, if he had any emotion left to give. Almost, but not quite. When they cloned the Champion they cloned his humanity, and although some might’ve called that a happy accident right now he had never hated it more. Humanity was weakness here.  
  
Haggar’s patience runs out and the hint of motherliness fades to black wrath in an instant. The slivers of purple light through the bars of his cell are strangled by the appearance of two more Druids, their dark, flowing robes seeming to draw in all the light, all the colour, until nothing was left at all except a darkness deep enough to drown in.  
“If you don’t come they’ll hurt you. I’ll _make_ them hurt you. _Come here.”_  
  
Sometimes he wonders if Haggar is tired of him, is trying to feed him enough rope for him to hang himself with, waiting for the day he genuinely refuses her. As it is he can’t stare her down for more than a few minutes before bending to her threat, uncurling himself with all the hesitance of a wounded animal and pacing tentatively towards the cell door. The steel bars fade as he reaches them and he steps into the deep purple light, watching them slip back into existence. There is no door, not really, just bars. Only a Druid can get him in or out of that cell so really it’s a good thing that it looks like he’s on a ship populated almost solely by them.  
  
As they walk down empty corridors he holds his breath, steps purposeful despite the urge to be deliberately slow. He knows the two behind him won’t allow that. Like all Galra ships the walls are decorated with the same shape of Emperor Zarkon’s insignia repeated over and over again, a dripping tap of superiority until there could be no doubt who owned every life within the metal structure. It’s all he’s ever been allowed to know beside porthole-sized glimpses of deep space but when they turn left he knows he won’t even get those, not today. If they had turned right then it wouldn’t have been so hard to keep putting one foot in front of the other consistently. He could deal with the harsh white lights of the laboratory. He could deal with the pain, the sting before the anaesthetic kicked in on days where the procedures they were putting him through were just too brutal for even Druids not to feel some modicum of pity for their victim - but they weren’t going to the laboratory today.  
  
Instead, they arrived at a sealed metal door that slid back into a much wider space, the square pit of an arena stretching out below them. It wasn’t large but it was just large enough, four gates marking entrance points for combatants. The raucous buzz of chatter from the sea of purple and red-clad Galra that lazed in the seats assaulted his senses almost immediately, the low hum from the corridor becoming a roar that clawed and writhed between his ears, making his heart thud faster, _faster_ as his feet rooted before the set of steps that led downward towards one of the gates. He didn’t know why he looked, tall frame only allowing a single childlike quiver, from Haggar to the owl-like white mask of the Druid on his other side with the easily shredded hope that today was the day they would spare him. Instead he was met with silence and disinterest, and he swallowed as the din of an announcer he’d long since stopped paying any attention to at all on his visits rang through the stands. This arena was only admissible to the higher ranks of the Galran army, the Commanders and Druids who wanted to track the progress of Haggar’s little experiment with their own eyes.   
  
As always, the bloodshed didn’t start with actual bloodshed. Instead the screech of metal-on-metal sounded long and loud as gladiator robots where belched up from the arena’s stomach on raising platforms, and he knew what was happening, he knew what they were training him to do. The robots were even usually helpfully colour-coded although they looked nothing like the Paladins whose weapons and fighting styles they parodied. He was a copy surrounded by copies, dodging laser-sighted rifle fire and the swing of a blade with no small effort until one by one only charred twists of metal remained. Then, since there truly was no rest for the wicked, more copies came - only they weren’t robots, and the dread that he felt as the large metal gates started to inch heavily upward permeated all the way down to bone marrow.  
  
Kuro had never been the first copy, after all. He was only the penultimate result of the grand experiment Haggar had created, and his reward for that victory was to stare into his - Shiro’s - eyes as he killed them. The failures died by his hand and then, days later, when their blood-soaked corpses had been dragged down the other corridor, he gained their memories. He had already stolen what mockery of life Haggar had granted them, and then, not able to stop there, consumed everything that they were. And oh, how they loved him for it. For every bitter victory that Voltron won from them on the battlefield he took ten more for them against himself here, in the arena, feeling himself wither with each new shadow of himself that fell under his own.  
  
The problem wasn’t that he was cracking, his improved Galra-tech arm cutting through a human ribcage like butter as he watched the light in another set of dark eyes blink out, a supernova gasping it’s last and swallowed in a flash of merciless gold. The problem was that he had _cracked._ He couldn’t do anything else but crack, not like this, couldn’t live up to the expectations of the ruthless killer they all wanted to see when every still-beating heart he lifted like a golden trophy to the crowd’s eyes made him sick to his stomach with guilt. When he was crying, or laughing, could no longer tell which. He remembered Shiro’s friends, he remembered everything that Shiro was and that he’d never be able to grasp for himself no matter how desperately he wanted it.  
  
By the end of the night, when Haggar comes and he follows her in silent obedience, he is smiling so widely his mouth hurts - although the limbs that aren’t made of metal shake with each step he takes. Although his throat is raw from all the times he screams to be released. To not have to fight again. Takashi Shirogane has died by his hand sixteen times, today, and he knows that when Haggar is through with him Kuro will have consumed the real one just like he tore through the copies. Sixteen _failures_ have been expunged from his lineage, too weak or too quiet or _too human_ for Haggar to use for anything else. In the future he will look back on this moment and remember that the definition of madness is repeating the same action and expecting a different result, but he’ll also remember a line from a book read to him by a boy with the ocean in his eyes. A book about a trip down a rabbit hole and the ongoing presence of a purple, purring liar who faded in and out in the background, inconsistence the only permanent thing to it.  
_‘We’re all quite mad here.’_


	2. Injury

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lance starts his time as a prisoner the way Shiro did - in the arena. But he wasn't expecting to find Shiro there too.. or has he?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow that took a lot longer to finish than I expected. Enjoy, guys!  
> It's not the second prompt on the list, but it is if we go in chronological order.  
> This is intended to take place during season two not long after S2 ep3 'Shiro's Escape' and before S2 ep 4 'Greening The Cube', and the rest of the prompts will continue to fill inbetween/alongside the episodes in a similar fashion. Not beta'd so please excuse any mistakes, I have tried to catch them all but sadly your author is but a sad potato who likely misses things. Comments/kudos welcome and as always, if you would like to come screech with me you can find me on tumblr also as mystitrinqua.

There are no alarms going off when Lance wakes up, yawning widely and tugging his headphones off to carefully set them down on the small stand to one side of his bed. With as many siblings as he had, back safe on Earth, the chance of a whole bedroom to himself was a strange concept even now. Even at the Garrison he’d had Hunk as a roomie, so this was the first time he was regularly sleeping alone, and the headphones were as much a testament to the effect it was having on him as anything else. Space could be beautiful but the one thing he hated about it most was the _silence._    
  
He’d often joked that the coffee from the Garrison’s cafeteria was bad, but as he sidled to the kitchen after shucking on his usual jacket and jeans (thankfully they’d managed to figure out how to get the castle to make copies of their clothes although he always kept his jacket separate and was very particular about that, given it was a gift) and found Pidge staring with a distinctly despairing look into the bowels of a steaming mug of brown goo, he had to concede that 'Space Coffee' was worse.

 

They were lucky that Hunk had been able to reverse engineer something that tasted and looked roughly like coffee in the first place, really, as it seemed their friendly neighbourhood Alteans were perfectly happy to live off rations of goo till they dropped dead. The thought alone was enough to make Lance shudder and wish fervently for the cheeseburgers and fries from his favourite beachside place.

“What’s cookin’ good lookin’?” he asked cheerily, resisting the urge to cackle as Pidge groaned and buried her face further into her mug.

“Lance please, not this early in the morning.” She grit out. “Allura just got finished following up the leads from the last distress beacon…”

“…and?” He got the sense that Pidge wasn’t saying everything, even though something was clearly bothering her. Pidge didn’t usually join Shiro in going back for more than one cup but the second empty mug on the table said a lot about how uncomfortable she was right now.

“And they’ve found a hidden prison ship.”

“Oookay.” Pouring himself some ice water, Lance flopped into the seat opposite her, raising an eyebrow as she retreated into the steam coming from her mug. Of all people he’d thought Pidge would be the happiest about finding an accessible prison ship, that meant she might find her family onboard or at least finally get a concrete lead on them. “And this is a problem because..?”

“S’full of Druids.”

“Ah.” The word was enough to pull him up short. No more discussion necessary there - he’d only _heard_ about the Druids and if Shiro and Keith’s fights with them were anything to go by, he was happy to keep it that way. “That.. That’s fair. You worried?”

“Yeah. I mean.. What if Matt’s on that ship? Or my dad? What if the Druids have.. Done something to them? I don’t think I could cope with that, Lance.” Sighing, she pushed back from the table, abandoning her empty cup after gulping down the rest. “Think I need more sleep..”

 

* * *

 

Allura didn’t look any happier than Pidge had been that morning when she finally called them all onto the ship’s bridge over the intercom. Shiro and Keith looked tellingly red faced so they had most likely been sparring on the training deck (he refused to think about the other possibilities - that road of guesswork was both excessively well travelled and painful) and from the low chatter of mathematics that Pidge and Hunk broke off from it was fairly obvious they’d been in the impromptu lab set up in the Green Lion’s hangar.  
  
Gathering around the central console, his eyes travelled over the large holoscreen stretched out behind Allura. The prison ship was detailed on it, at least down to their best guesses from encountering others that were of the same class. It was strategically a lot more dangerous than the average battle cruiser, though. The ion canon was a given but if there were Druids that meant two other unknown variables: plenty of live hostages and the possibility of some very explosive quintessence-come-Galran-fuel-formula, like the canisters Keith had found before. Ships of this type also had a lot more actual live soldiers aboard compared to the low soldier-to-drone ratio of Galran freighter ships and scout vessels.  
  
From the looks of the small but elite class transport docked against the bottom of the ship’s hull there was an important commander or Druid on board, too. They were never left without a powerful get away vehicle so that they could always rejoin the main fleet if things on the ship went south. There was only one thing he _wasn’t_ expecting to see: an ominously blank spot in the aft section of the ship that took up several floors but remained a mystery to the castle’s scanners, almost as if they were purposefully being blocked by something on the ship in real time. The castle’s long range sensors should have been able to see what was there by now, they were close enough that the rest of the ship was slowly being mapped out for definite.  
  
“—ance? Lance?!”

“Huh?” Allura’s impatient voice cut his musing over the layout of the ship short and he realised they were all watching him, flushing a little as he shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Sorry, Princess, run that past me again?”

_“Typical…”_ he caught Pidge’s annoyed undertone but didn’t have the heart to call her out given their conversation this morning. Keith’s irritated sigh and rolled eyes weren’t something that slipped his notice either but Hunk shot him a brief smile of commiseration and that helped him bite back the snarky reply that wanted to come out in response to the red paladin’s silent derision. There were more important things to focus on.

“Are you happy to go with Pidge on this mission? We need stealth, not showmanship, and you are our best bet.”

“Stealth? And you’re sending Lance? Really?” He knew Keith wanted to get a little payback against the Druids for how badly Haggar had managed to hurt Shiro (or at least that was what he assumed it was) but he could do without the tone of sarcasm and this time he couldn’t bite his tongue, rounding on Keith.

“Says the person who charges into fights with no plan B and no back up, leaving the rest of us a man down.”

“Boys, please.” Allura interrupted, her best diplomatic smile in place as she looked over the faces of her team. None of them were particularly happy about this and to be honest, she didn’t blame them. “We need to know what they’re hiding. If our scanners can’t pick that up, neither can _any_ ship’s scanners, and that means the Druids are potentially hiding something from Zarkon.”

“What could be so important that they’d hide it from their own boss?” Hunk wondered aloud, voicing what they were all thinking as they clustered around the screen.

“Well, technically Haggar’s their boss.” Pidge pointed out. “Or that’s the word from their radio chatter, anyway.”

“If she is on board… it might be too dangerous to just send two of us.” Shiro had spoken for the first time in a while, and he wasn’t surprised that it was Haggar who provoked him - Shiro normally waited it out to help with a finite decision at the end after the team had finished bantering and working things out aloud, acting as the person who brought them all back to a focused point again. In the implication behind his words Lance could almost see the glowing wound that had been left in the aftermath of his one-on-one fight with Zarkon’s closest adviser.

“If all of you go, you’ll be spotted. The Green Lion’s cloaking can’t cover all five of you.” Coran pointed out, arriving on the scene a little late carrying some thin black wristbands, handing them to Pidge and Lance. “Here. If your armour gets too heavily damaged these should make sure we can still track where you are on the ship. Never know if you’ll need a speedy extraction.”

“Thanks, Coran.”

“Well, how about we hang back and if these two need the firepower, we can give them cover by making a loud, showy attack and then running off as soon as Lance and Pidge are back?” Hunk suggested, greeted with various looks of consideration by the others until Shiro nodded. If it settled his mind then it was a good enough plan as far as Lance was concerned, even if he didn’t like the idea of putting all five of them at risk any more than Shiro did.

“Alright, let’s do that. We should take some time to familiarise ourselves with the layout of the ship, though.” Shiro added. “Just incase.”  
  
It wasn't until they really couldn't put it off any more when Lance and Pidge decided to bite the bullet and head down to the hangars. Anticipation was already zipping through him, the anxiety accompanied by leaving the safety of the castle heavy in his limbs. He'd done enough combat training by now to know that adrenaline wasn't anyone's friend in a fight but that didn't stop the rush of it all the same.

"Oh, hey, I forgot something." Pidge stopped and it took a few steps for him to follow suit, glancing over his shoulder at her as she started to take a few steps backward, patting herself down. "I'll catch you up, yeah? Won't be two minutes. Don't go threading any needles without me."

"Not much chance of that, we need your lion's stealth to get under their radar if we want to get close."

"Well, look at that." Pidge quipped, smiling warmly. "He can be taught."

"Yeah yeah, hurry up."  
  
The massive vault-like space that held the lion's hangars wasn't as silent as he'd expected it to be, knowing that the others were already mostly waiting on the bridge with Allura so that they could track their progress on the scanners and decide a different course of action then and there as a group if need be.

"-don't think I haven't noticed you spending all your free time alone." Shiro's tone wasn't accusatory in the slightest but it still had an edge of gentle disapproval, and Lance's heart clenched as he tucked himself inside the doorway of Blue's hangar. He knew he shouldn't be listening, but it probably wasn't going to be a very long or serious conversation, so what was the harm?

"So? I always do that." Came Keith's reply, the tension in his voice suggesting he was probably his usual clammed-up self, arms folded and avoiding Shiro's eye with practiced ease.

"Yeah yeah, I know. But this is different." There was a long suffering sigh, and Lance felt a stab of guilt at how tired Shiro sounded with the whole situation. He hadn't asked to be put in charge of this group and as much as he was well aware how much of a shining example of humanity Shiro could be, he was only human. "Avoiding people is normal but you're snapping at Lance a lot more than usual. I know he rubs you the wrong way sometimes, but I thought we were past this?"

"We are, I just.." Lance allowed himself a sigh of his own as Keith fell silent, struggling for words. "I hate this stealth crap. There's a ship full of Druids doing god knows what to whoever they have captive, and we're... what, _hiding_ while we send Lance and Pidge in to sneak some information out? We're not even going to try and stop whatever's going on here?!"

"Maybe if we had more air support..." Shiro sounded like he was seriously considering it and it took everything Lance had not to stick his head around the door to Keith's hangar to ask them if they were both stupid. They were nowhere near prepared for a full out offensive against a ship full of Druids, even if there wasn't anyone of high rank aboard, Shiro was right in that they didn't have enough support ships just for starters, since the castle's defences were quite frankly unreliable at best. The only thing they had in their favour was the ability to run away fast if they were caught and if someone on that prison ship got in touch with the main fleet there was no telling how quickly any avenue of escape would be closed. "Look, if you want to talk about whatever else is bothering you, you know I'll listen. Just don't let it get to a point where you're lashing out. Lance has battles of his own to fight that we'll probably never hear about."

"Yeah.. I don't mean to be so harsh."

"We both know that, but he doesn't. Let's just ease off a bit, maybe. No one needs any rivalries kicking off again."

"Hm, true. Although I don't know where that came from in the first place. We weren't even fighter pilots at the same time."

"I don't think that really mattered in the wider scheme of things, Keith."

"Well.. yeah. I'll try and tone it down, you're right. Heh.. usually are."  
  
The sound of their conversation turning away to other topics as the two of them walked off away from the hangars started to recede and Lance sighed as he shifted his weight against the wall. It was better if neither of them knew he'd ever heard that but knowing that Shiro could see through his mask of cheerfulness surprisingly didn't make him feel better when he'd expected it to. Right now it felt like he was just adding to their leader's burden, having to worry about a team-member who didn't feel like they could rely on everyone else enough to tell them the truth as well as putting up with Keith's tense moods over the last few days. It was like ever since their encounter with Ulaz, Keith had been unusually on edge, and it was starting to have a ripple effect on the rest of them if even Shiro’s patience was wearing down.  
  
However short it had been, that conversation felt like something he shouldn’t have heard, and it was quickly forgotten in the wake of hopping into Blue’s cockpit and going through the normal pre-flight checks while he waited for Pidge to catch up to him again. Although Blue’s comforting presence never left his mind it was always made a lot more intense when he was actually sat in the lion herself, washing over him like a security blanket with a side-order of some much needed mental clarity.

“Lance, you happy?”

Pidge’s face appeared to one side of his front screen, and he sighed, tilting his head slightly to look at her. He’d long since finished his checks by the time she came back to her Lion and started to get ready herself and had even had enough time to grab a pouch of water from the onboard supply cache. So much for ‘ready in two minutes’.

“I wouldn’t quite say happy. Not with any of this.”

“Yeah, me neither.” She agreed, visually steeling herself as the Green lion started to move and Lance adjusted Blue’s direction to follow closely behind. If he strayed too far out even by a metre, he’d be visible, but if he got too close they might knock each other off course. Flying so closely was only easy because of their close bond - or whatever hippy-sounding but oddly comforting phrase Allura liked to use. “But we don’t have much choice either way. Let’s just get out of there as quick as we can.”

“Agreed.”

 

* * *

 

It had been repeated time and time again by their Garrison instructors that even if you had a plan, real field missions almost never went the way you expected. Having your own individual plan B was always a necessity and he’d never been in a situation where that advice had failed him yet, especially stealth missions. Getting to the ship’s hull undetected and splitting off to do their own separate parts of the mission were about the only things that actually went well. Pidge looped the camera footage of the hallways after hacking into another Rover-like bot to get at the Galra’s technology without the aid of Shiro’s arm, and he wished her a quiet good luck as he watched her disappear down the maze-like corridors in the direction of the ship’s databanks.  
  
For a while all was surprisingly smooth sailing, as he found himself largely at the end of the ship that didn’t seem to be occupied by anything but drones. Pidge had gotten them as close to the anomaly on their scanners as she could while guesstimating from the outside, and drones were easy enough to avoid as long as you had somewhere to hide while you assessed their patrol patterns. It was a tactic they’d all picked up from Shiro but the fact he’d had to learn it in the first place just pulled uncomfortably at Lance’s heart. The only good thing he could say about the whole thing was that at least it had been aliens who were the aggressors and not humans. The one time he’d tried to explain the political situation on Earth to Coran, he’d gotten lost somewhere around which country had first contact rights and explaining that landing on the wrong patch of soil when they finally got back there could ruffle enough feathers to start a war before the crushing homesickness set in and he had to stop thinking about it altogether.  
  
It all went wrong about the same time that his hiding space was passed by two actual Galran soldiers, rather than droids, who were having a hushed conversation as they headed further into the ship in the direction of whatever was being hidden from the castle’s sensors.

“I don’t know why you’d bet on anyone else but ‘The Champion’, that’s a total waste of your wages given what the head Druid says about his untarnished record.”

“You mean Haggar? Damn, she gives me the creeps.” Came a second voice, and Lance couldn’t help thinking _‘you and me both, buddy, and I haven’t even met her’_ dryly as he poked his head out from his hiding spot and then slowly began to follow them, making a point to sync his footsteps with theirs to avoid being heard. The mention of betting was setting the wheels spinning in his head. “Betting at all is a waste of your wages, besides. House always wins in the end.”

“True. But in the meantime arenas are always a good place to make a quick buck. Even officer salary only gets you so much..”  
  
Lance came to a temporary stop in the middle of the hallway as he remembered where he’d heard that name before. _Champion._

That had only ever meant Shiro, and it had only come from the lips of fellow captives who remembered seeing him being sent around the Galran arena circuit… but it couldn’t be the real Shiro, not anymore. Yes it was true that they’d accepted the idea that Shiro, Hunk and Keith would act as backup if they needed extraction, but he’d have known that had gone on. He hadn’t been creeping through corridors for almost half an hour only to miss something massive like that.  
  
On the other hand… if everything was silent because the other three had been intercepted and captured before they could even get close, then of course they’d send Shiro straight to the closest arena. For old time’s sake as much as to throw him off. The way that Shiro had just locked up the first time they all encountered a combat gladiator screeched through Lance’s mind at what felt like a million miles a second and his heart dropped through the floor, only to be followed by a shot of determination moments later. If there was even the slightest chance Shiro could be trapped here he wasn’t going to wait around.  
  
The sound of the conversation disappeared as the two Galra got further ahead of him down the corridor and he turned away, ducking back into another alcove to flick a switch on the underside of his helmet. They’d essentially turned their helmet-mounted comms off so that radio chatter didn’t give them away, much like not dropping spanners on covert submarines, while they were hiding but this qualified as an emergency, he thought. If Pidge’s were still off she’d just hear his message as a recording the next time she turned them back on to get in touch with the castle ship.

“Yo, Pidge. Did the others have to come aboard? I think I just heard some Galra talking about Shiro and I’m gonna go check it out.” He murmured, hoping that his low voice was going to be loud enough for the microphone to pick it up clearly. “Nothing up this end, just empty corridors, but they were talking about some sort of arena so I think that’s what they’re hiding here. Let me know when you’re headed back to meet the lions.”

He had barely stumbled through the doorway to some kind of viewing deck, the stepped sides of the large space travelling a long way down to the wide circle of black sand that made up the arena's pit packed with Galra of various ranks, before pain arced up his spine and blackness followed it, the sound of Pidge's muffled voice fading in and out as she'd evidently chosen that moment to unmute her helmet's comms unit. Frantic as she was, obviously having heard his low grunt of pain, the world was swimming and he couldn't get the words out. It was far more important to use what little strength he had left to reach out to Blue with his mind, get her away from the ship. He'd had his Lion stolen once and he'd be damned if it happened again - he was easily replaceable, Blue was not.

The Druid that had come from behind him stepped into the light, then, concealed sneer still very much palpable as the deep purple lightening that had just stolen the breath from his lungs crackled around it's hand and faded out.

"The Paladins of Voltron are here." The voice that issued from behind the white mask was cold and sharp, burying itself in his brain like a burrowing insect and making him shudder. Everything about whatever these beings were was _wrong_ on an instinctual level, what little of his natural faculties still remained screeching at him to get out of range of the Druid before whatever had corrupted this one spread to him, too. He felt the response entirely in his mind, too, along with an accompanying wave of nausea that probably had nothing to do with physical illness.

"Is that so? Make sure to give any you find a proper welcome." That was Haggar, he had very little doubt. He'd heard the voice before in the background of transmissions they'd intercepted between Zarkon and his active commanders. "It would be rude not to entertain our guests, after all."

Attempting to get up was all he could do, right now, feeling a motivational urgency from the back of his mind that had Blue's comforting presence all over it. Leaden pressure against his back rewarded the effort with a rough shove back to the floor, though, directly to the spot of his armour where the lightning had hit him, and the pain was enough to make him see stars. The last concrete though the could grasp before unconsciousness took hold completely was that at least Blue's presence had felt fainter. That meant she'd retreated a safe distance from the ship. Even if he was captured, the rest of the team would be okay.

The stab of a needle just under the skintight black bodysuit that provided a protective layer between him and his armour _\- which was still on? that was an oddity but at least it meant he was still armed -_ was what woke him up again, slowly, pulse pounding somewhere under his skin despite his sluggishness. It wasn't a panic response but as he stared up at the large barred gateway, clanking as it retracted upward, and out onto briefly familiar black sand beyond, he was damned well starting to get there. Snipers didn't do well inside arenas and right now it was the only skillset he had. It wasn't like the days of target practice were going to help him if whoever they sent out from the other gate was a skilled melee fighter. There weren't going to be any safe perches or much cover on a wide circle of sandy space like the arena he remembered getting a glimpse of however long ago it had been since he was caught by the Druid.

An echoing noise, obviously an announcer of some sort but indistinguishable through his own rising panic, prompted him to stop. Panic wasn't going to get him anywhere and it was all him, right now. If the others had any sense they weren't just ploughing straight in to rescue him assuming Pidge knew that he'd been captured.

What would Shiro do, right now?

Thoughts of _patience yields focus_ battled with the reality of seeing what happened when their leader had flashbacks to his time in Lance's current position to make an uncomfortable mixture of optimism and anxiety.

He had no intention of standing on ceremony, stepping out onto the sand before whoever was reading a spiel to the crowd had finished speaking. The quicker that he got the lay of the land outside of the gate the better his chances of defending himself were and he wasn't jeopardising that for the sake of making the Galra who wanted to watch him die a bit happier. _‘We who are about to die salute you, my ass.’_ He thought, allowing himself this brief moment of self pep-talk. Not if he could help it.

It ended up being just as bad as he suspected when he cleared the cramped entry space behind the gate. The walls that surrounded the central pit were perfectly smooth, the lack of blood stains suggesting that they were either deliberately far enough out from the ring to avoid bloodspatter or regularly cleaned The grating just before them wasn’t, though, clearly intended to act as a run off if whoever had the final say wanted to watch a stalemate end in a messy display. The sickly copper smell wasn’t at all compromised by the sand, and Lance made the mistake of looking down through the grating as he stepped over it. There were distinctly heart-shaped blobs in the red soup of gore and dismembered drone parts underneath him, and his stomach gave the kind of twisting churn that would have made Hunk proud, although he’d noticed that his friend was getting motion sickness a lot less frequently these days.

_‘Don’t think about it. **Don’t.’**_ He chastised himself, trying to focus on looking for any kind of cover he could put between himself and the other gate. _‘You are **not** throwing up right now. Not dying is more important, come on. **Move** , idiot.’_

“Back for one last fight this cycle by popular demand, the VS-148 Recreation Dome welcomes an exotic capture from an undocumented planet and current undefeated conqueror of the arena: The Champion!”

His time was up, the announcers words for once not blurring to useless noise now that he was trying to focus himself. The only cover throughout the circular space was offered by four large pillars acting as supports or the cavernous roofing provided by the ship’s outer hull. At least it was comforting to know that if any of the lions managed to crack that shell open to the void of space they’d all die instantly.

The shadow cast by the gate lifted to reveal an instantly recognisable face, scar included, and all the coiled tension left the brunet in a gasp. He’d hoped against hope not to find Shiro here, in the kind of hell he’d already clawed his way through once. This could actually be a blessing in disguise, though. It wasn’t like the two of them were actually going to fight each other.

“Shiro!” Holding his hand to his side as he walked hurriedly forward across the arena, summoning his bayard in the process, would later become something he was grateful he’d had the intuition to do ahead of time. “You’re here too? What happened?!”

The fact that he wasn’t wearing his familiar black armour should probably have been Lance’s first clue that everything about this setup wasn’t what it seemed. ‘Shiro’ crouched, the purple light that accompanied the activation of his prosthetic slightly whiter than he remembered since he saw it last, creating a menacing glow before a small gust of air whirlpooled through the space and he shot forwards towards Lance at an inhuman speed for someone of his considerable height and build. It took a few seconds for his brain to catch up as he was pile-driven into one of the columns, feeling more than hearing the crack of a rib over his own rushed breaths as he stared, wide-eyed, into the face of his attacker. Shiro’s eyes were yellow, not their familiar dark shade, and it became obvious that even if he was physically the same Lance was very much still going to have to fight him if he wanted to stay on his feet.

The crowd jeered as he hit the sand, coughing up blood and using the column he was pretty sure he’d left an imprint of his back behind on to stagger to his feet, one hand pressing against the spot in his armour where the contact had been. His opponent waited in silence for him to get back up, still a little dizzy from the force of the blow. Breathing was painful now and he could feel the scuffed dent on his chest where the white plating had caved inward under the force it had tried to absorb.

“Have to say, I wasn’t expecting it be you.” At this point he wasn’t sure whether he just couldn’t move fast enough or that he really didn’t want to believe Shiro would attack him. He wasn’t going to risk firing on a teammate at this close range, though. It certainly still _sounded_ like Shiro, although there was an unfamiliar hardness to his words, and Lance was very much a believer of the ‘if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck’ theory when faced with situations like this. Best to err on the side of caution but most of the time things were exactly what they looked like, at least on some level. “Not that seeing a new face every now and again is a bad thing.”

Lance opened his mouth to respond and then shut it again. He wasn’t going to be goaded into talking while Shiro or whatever the hell this thing was formulated a more concrete strategy than just rushing him. Shifting his weight sideways, he ignoring the stinging pain in his chest as he moved from his position backed up against the wall. He’d been an idiot to let himself get caught like that and until he figured out exactly what was going on, he wasn’t letting it happen again. He had to keep them moving, keep distance between the two of them while he judged whether it was safer to try and talk the other man out of this little bout of lethal tango they were locked in.

After what felt like several drawn out moments of running away, giving himself cover fire and changing locations, Lance was flagging and his opponent was not. He hadn’t even changed tactics, but then again he didn’t need to when the sheer heat coming out of the Galran prosthetic was enough to do the Blue Paladin serious damage at close range. Although he couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was he was becoming slowly more confident that it would have been safe to do the other man some damage, should he want to.

This ‘Shiro’ had _claws_ , for a start. The light coming from his arm was definitely whiter now that he had the time to appreciate the difference, and the yellow eyes didn’t seem to be a momentary trick of the light. The few times Lance been far enough away and gained enough of an interval to try and line up a decent shot, he’d found himself on the end of the same purple-ish lightning that the Druid who captured him had used, and he _knew_ Shiro couldn’t do that despite how well his onboard technology had been built. Shiro and electronics in general were a bad idea given how conductive he’d become. The stranger had also spent the entire time since he appeared smirking coldly, like this fight was some sort of game. Lance couldn’t even remember the last time he’d seen Shiro wear that expression.

“You’re.. not Shiro.” Lance’s words were hushed, another parried blow of many leaving him on his back again, panting and exhausted and with hands tight around his neck that had gone thankfully slack as a knee pressed against his chest plate to keep him pinned. It seemed to strike a dangerous chord, a curious frown replacing the infuriating smirk for a solid few seconds before the expression was reassumed like the mask Lance now saw for what it was. God only knew he wore enough of his own these days to see one in someone else.

“Neither are you.”

Kuro had meant what he said when he’d told Lance that he wasn’t expecting that the first Paladin he faced would be one of the few who was at a sore disadvantage in a melee fight. Haggar had probably expected a bloodbath. Lance was lithe and strong but he wasn’t built to have an advantage against someone like him.

“What are you?!” Lance’s face was flushed with exertion, clearly visible now that a previous impact had knocked his helmet loose. Of all the things he’d expected to feel now that he was finally close to achieving the purpose he’d been created for, attraction wasn’t one of them, and yet there was some vague spark of it lying in wait underneath the already thick tension between them nonetheless.

He hadn’t known he _could_ feel it, until now.

“That’s a rude thing to say.” He teased, one of the hands that had slackened against the brunet’s jaw purposefully tilting his head so that Lance couldn’t look away from him, trying to filter through Shiro's memories for everything he could get at that would tell him enough to be at home in Lance's head. “Did I never teach you _manners,_ Lance?”

“Maybe when you find some yourself.” There was a flash of anger that he couldn’t resist, then, tightening his grip on Lance’s throat again until he felt him kicking against the sand, his chest twitching at the lack of oxygen. That would teach him not to shoot his mouth off.

“Hush.” Scolding him lightly, he glanced up at the box where he knew Haggar was sat, watching. It was obvious to all that Lance had lost their fight by now and the final decision on his life was hers.

Even if Lance hadn’t seriously tried to harm him, which was strange. He’d seen enough video footage of how Lance fought to know that if he’d had so much as a safe perch and some real motivation, the Blue Paladin could have done him some real damage. All with a smile. He’d actively chosen not to - at first because he’d mistaken him for Shiro, yes, but that didn’t explain why he didn’t even look tempted to pick up his rifle, press it square to Kuro’s temple and pull the trigger. He could most likely even complete the action too fast to be stopped by any attempt to put distance between them, too.

“Y’know… I’m proud of you for getting this far.” Lance was struggling again, twisting in his grip and trying to push himself up even if he was like a dog chasing cars. If he managed to get free of Kuro it was only going to be so long before they found themselves back in some rough approximation of these positions and they both knew that by now. “But that’s enough, Lance. It’s not your fault. It was cruel of them to make you fight me… you could never have won.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

“Really?” Kuro’s claws tapped against the scraped and dented plating on his chest and he felt more than heard the breath catch in the brunet’s body now it wasn’t really being choked out of him anymore. “I can take your heart out for you right now, if you want. The crowd want it. No valiant rescue seems to be forthcoming from your team, either.”

For the first time, Lance’s eyes seemed to swim with a bitter emotion that wasn’t uncertainty or fear - but as an observer he couldn’t place it. The soft look wasn’t an emotion that he’d ever felt and he couldn’t place it in his stolen memories either.

“If you’re gonna do it just get it over with.” Lance hissed, then, new venom in his words. “Stop dragging this out.”

“…Alright.”

Lance’s eyes closed as the soft, mechanical whirr of an incoming death sounded intimately close to his face, and Kuro almost envied him that kind of inner peace. To just accept something without lashing out was not a skill that Kuro possessed unless it involved going against Haggar.

“That’s enough, Kuro.” Speaking of the devil appeared to summon her bodily down to the arena floor, lip curling in disgust as she stared down at Lance’s defeated form still trapped under Kuro’s weight. “He still has his uses alive.”

“Sure? The crowd want blood.” Haggar shot him a look for daring to speak and he shrugged, falling silent. At least Lance knew his name, now, he supposed. Not that it would be very useful to him when the Druid was done with him.

“The crowd will get what they are given.” She replied, waving a dismissive hand. “They are easy enough to redirect, and you still have much more work to do here. _You.”_

Lance tensed suddenly, and Kuro realised that the fight hadn’t gone out of the Blue Paladin at all. Not like he’d assumed. Had he simply been playing dead to see if that changed anything? To make the crowd get bored of their jeering and force Haggar out into the light to call the fight one way or the other before he was too seriously injured?

“Since you’ve taken such a liking to Kuro that you refuse to fight him, how about you join him, instead? We haven’t had a human to experiment on for a long time…”

“N-No..” He sounded so small, then, recoiling backward, that Kuro couldn’t help but see himself in Lance for a brief moment. The sympathy was rapidly discarded as he pulled the brunet to his feet none too gently. “You can’t-”

“-Put him in a cell and make sure he stays there. Our emperor will no doubt tear his attention away from the Black Lion long enough for one of the Paladins.” Haggar continued over the quiet objections, a wave of her hand summoning two familiar Druids. The sight of them taking hold of Lance and disappearing in a curl of smoke made Kuro’s heart sink.

It was all too familiar.


	3. Deception

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lance and Pidge expected it to be a routine prisoner extraction that certainly did not include becoming prisoners themselves. Kuro has something to say about that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so happy with this chapter. Also so happy that it's finished, wow. I originally wasn't going to do much with the dark!Lance tag but then my lovely co-conspirator got involved and now... well, it's all just got out of hand. As an added extra, the Lions are giving the paladins their own special abilities but they're designed to be subtle and I'm going to see if I can work them all in. See if you can guess what Lance's is. ;)  
> Enjoy!

“Tomorrow I want you back in the arena. Your training must resume as normal.” Haggar walked at a leisurely pace behind the two Druids carrying Lance’s unconscious body from the cell in which they’d dumped him, and Kuro followed her. Free time was an alien concept but apparently securing a Paladin of Voltron was all he’d had to do in order to get some for himself, which probably explained what he was doing walking a respectful two or three paces behind the woman whose research was the reason he was breathing. Haggar may as well have been his mother, even if he hated her.

Even if he remembered the human parents of Takashi Shirogane he could separate them in his mind from her, she was still the closest thing he had to a protector. As far as he knew the process of his creation was a secret, and the Galra stationed here didn’t get enough access to the wider fleet to know whether or not he was the real thing. The consequences if they found out were something that he feared for the first time, seeing Lance’s limp form. If he was here then the other Paladins were likely closeby, possibly still on the ship if they hadn’t been caught, and that meant he was close, too. The ‘real’ Shiro.

He wondered what would happen, if they met. Would they fight, or would Shiro look at him like Lance had, his hands stayed? With shock and pity in his eyes, instead of the disgust and hatred that he had always been taught that he would see?

“Alright.” His hands shook as he followed Haggar down the corridor and into the labs, adrenaline starting to kick its way through his system set off by things as simple as the reflective glint of metal on the strip of bright steel around the doorway. The changing of light from a deep purple to the blue-orange haze of electricals and bubbling quintessence mixtures. Their Emperor needed to be immortal, and for that he needed the Druid’s ability to condense life force out of things and make it into a more versatile form they could use to power their ships and keep their soldiers in top shape - Haggar was comfortable in her power, here, and surprisingly talkative if prompted carefully and with enough respect. “What are you going to do with him?”

They laid Lance’s form down on an operating table, the tips of his long limbs trailing over the sides making his relaxed limbs splay at awkward angles, and it brought back another memory, a memory that belonged to Shiro as he walked into the common room onboard the castle ship to find Lance napping on one of the over-sized sofas. Shiro had chuckled, going to get a blanket to cover the Blue Paladin with and then gently squeezed a pillow under Lance’s head to stop him waking up with an aching neck, and Kuro’s fingers curled into tight fists as he choked the memory back down. _He_ had done this to Lance, by waiting and allowing Haggar the final say instead of just taking his heart out while he could still grant Lance the gift of a clean, quick death. He could do nothing for him now.  
“Ah, Kuro.. You should know better than to ask questions you don’t really want to know the answer to.” Haggar replied, watching with a cruel smile as Lance’s unconscious form was stripped of his chipped and dented armour. They glowed bright blue and disappeared one by one as they were set down too far away from their owner’s body, but Haggar didn’t seem surprised by that in the slightest.  
“Is it supposed to do that?”  
“Altean combat technology will always return to the nearest ship, unless your quintessence-bond to it is stronger than the pull of the ship’s core.” Haggar replied, shrugging. “It… discourages research. It also means the Lions are still closeby.”

Once Lance was down to the skintight black bodysuit, some thin straps were secured around his torso and one of the Druids walked over to a cylindrical tank, the first of a short line against one of the closest walls. Kuro remained silent, a small frown on his face as he watched the table wheeled closer to it. The Druids hovered over Lance with silent, precise movements as they took a large blood sample and then secured a respiratory mask over his face attached by a thick cable to the machinery inside the tube. There was quintessence mixed in that water, the soft orange glow seeming to get more intense in pulses the approximate length of a heartbeat that slowed as Lance was lowered into the tube. The straps were clipped to a metal frame in order to keep him securely under the waterline, and the other Druid flicked a few switches on the front of the machine. The glowing became noticeably brighter for a few seconds before starting to thrum at a steady pace that matched the wavering line of Lance’s pulse displayed on a flat screen embedded in the front of the plexiglas tube.  
“You’re about to have a team-mate all your own, Kuro. You should be happy.”

He remained silent at that, biting his lip against the words that wanted to come out as he watched Haggar’s greedy eyes rake over Lance’s unconscious form while she motioned for the Druids to begin setting up the second tank in the line, the urge to protect him from whatever evil was about to happen here unwelcome but undeniable. He couldn’t tell if it was Shiro’s instinct or his own, and he couldn’t stand that Lance’s unconscious presence was enough to blur the line between the two.  
For many reasons, he was not happy.

* * *

Lance woke up groggily to a dry throat and the feeling of floating. The deep thrum of the Galran ship was easily identifiable but it had a strange muted quality to it, and it was only then that he realised where the floaty feeling was coming from. He was suspended in a faintly amber liquid, the mask over his face pumping stale-tasting air into his lungs and affording his eyes enough protection that he could open them without risking whatever was mixed into the water. The tank was large, and he could feel straps criss-crossing his front, but his hands were bound in front of him with familiar magnetic cuffs.

Footsteps were as equally dampened as the engine noise, but he saw Haggar step into the glow just in front of the tank. A second person joined her, their body half shrouded in darkness for a moment but markedly leaner than hers, tanned skin a much too familiar shade.  
“You can step a little closer, Lance.” Haggar’s voice was distorted through the thick plexiglas but he could still hear the malice curled behind it inside the tank just fine. “Don’t you want to see the progress we made with your clone?”  
He couldn’t help the scream that was strangled by the mask as the second person stepped forward, resting shackled hands against the glass with a look of curiosity that was seriously dampened by insecurity and stress. Blue eyes widened as Lance thrashed against the straps, pulling uselessly against the cuffs keeping his wrists locked together at his front. _They couldn’t do this to him._

And yet, they had. Lance stared wide eyed into his own eyes, and the Lance beyond the glass stared back with an expression of identical shock. He was an exact copy even down to the slightly uneven posture, his weight shifted more to one side than the other, dressed in an identical black bodysuit. Physically if they’d stood side by side in one of those cheesy sci-fi movie _“no, **I’m** real, shoot him”_ scenes, he doubted that even Hunk would be able to make that call on appearances alone.  
“I-I’m not a clone, I’m the real one! Let me go!” his words were half lost through the water and the layers of machinery between them and he saw his mirror image’s eyes flick sideways, to Haggar, and narrow in uncertainty. The silent question he looked too scared to ask but could read in his own face. _Is he? Am I?_

“Why?!” Lance’s internal screaming dulled to a low hum as he heard _his own voice_ sound from another person’s lips. “Why would you.. What do you get out of this?!”  
“Well, Kuro came first, of course..” Haggar stepped away from the tank, her face hidden in shadow, but Lance could still hear her faintly through the glass. “But he was…. Unstable. Merging the DNA and the quintessence of an individual separately was a mistake, it happens much better when done simultaneously. As your friend in the tank proves. Thanks to you, now we can clone _every_ member of Voltron.”  
“No.”  
_“No?”_  
“You think you’re going to get it all your way? You’re wrong. Voltron will stop you, even if I’m trapped here.” His voice was shaking, but at the same time there was the same unshakable faith in his team coming from this alternate version of him that Lance had felt since the first day they formed Voltron. The same certainty that even without him the team would continue. Excel, even.  
“Foolish boy. He has all your memories as well as your body, Lance. He is you, from your last scar to your first breath.” There was a clatter as Haggar flicked a switch, and Lance saw the lurch in his own body towards the tank - his own face twisted in concern for himself - before he felt the blinding pain wrack through him, his hoarse scream and thrash against his bonds uselessly sloshing water against the sides of the tank but doing little else. She sneers at him again, icy gaze measuring him and finding him wanting. “Admittedly not much to work with, but he will suffice. We’ve been able to make a masterpiece from scraps before and we’ll do it again.”

The last thing Lance remembered was the pale quality to the face he saw outside the tank, his skin ashen and his expression nauseated. The pain narrows his vision, though, coloured spots crawling in front of his eyes as his involuntary thrashing became weaker, absorbed by the liquid he was suspended in until he could do little more than tremor and pray for it all to end. He just wanted it to stop, desperate, his mind racing as the other Lance stepped away from the glass. The thin back that was turned to him caught what little glow from the tank wasn’t blurred to his vision, but there was little else Lance could do, his last thought before unconsciousness welled up to meet him was that even if he died here, this whole ship had to go. Kuro’s cruel smirk hovering in his mind’s eye now with an added sense of ominous foreboding. Against the possibility of a full roster of cloned Paladins with access to the universe’s greatest weapon, his life was a small sacrifice to make.

* * *

When Lance next jolts awake, the strapping is gone but the handcuffs are not, and the weird tank has been replaced with a cell. The rumble of the ship’s engine is almost comforting, now, and he is thankful for the silence and the darkness compared to the bright light that had been aimed at him while in the laboratory. The pain of whatever Haggar did to him - or more likely all the involuntary thrashing - has left him sore and tired, even though he can tell it has been many hours since they boarded by how far the moon rotating around a small planet that made a backdrop for the prison ship has travelled on its cycle. His caved rib was still making it slightly hard to breathe, too, but that seemed to have either gone numb or been somewhat healed by the liquid he’d been suspended in and he couldn’t feel any new injuries.

There had been a small scratch along the left side of his forehead from one of the many occasions he’d had to dodge superheated, glowing claws minus a helmet, and forehead wounds bled like a bitch… but he couldn’t feel any residual stickiness for flaking dried blood against the side of his face, so the liquid must have healed that up as soon as it came in contact. That was odd but he wasn’t going to complain. Aside from the adrenaline injection that had forced him awake before they shoved him out into the arena, they hadn’t pumped anything else into his veins in the interim, either. Good sign.

Attempting to raise his hands so that he could explore the spot where the bleeding wound should have been caused two events in rapid succession: a jolt of pain through his shoulders as the movement failed because of the magnetic pull of the cuffs on his wrists, and a side order of aching in his ribs as he inhaled sharply.  
**_‘Fuck.’_** Whimpering in pain he squeezed his eyes shut, and the most he could do was roll over onto his side and sluggishly sit up, his movements slow and careful to prevent any further agitation of his injury. _‘I’m going to have to start a swear jar when I get back to the castle. Can’t go teaching the Alteans bad language before they ever visit Earth.’_

The cell was little better than a small corner, a rough rectangle outlined by the purple light coming through the barred doorway at one end. There was no doorway or hinge in those bars, he noticed, which begged the question of how they hell he’d gotten through them when they put him in here. That had to also be some kind of Druid shenanigans.

He could still feel Blue’s presence, hovering concernedly in the back of his mind. His lion was very much here for him throughout this experience even though it distressed her that she couldn’t physically protect him without being too much of a capture risk herself, and he was very thankful for the companionship. Now wasn’t the time to feel sorry for himself, though, Pidge could still be on the ship without any back up and like hell was he staying around to become a guinea pig for the Druids. They had to destroy this ship before Haggar or his clone could escape it and for all he knew they were already gone. Tears pricked at his eyes and for a moment or two he envied Shiro for being so _blissfully_ unaware of Kuro's existence.

“You’re awake.”  
Light footsteps sounded through the small space, clanking on metal sheet flooring as Kuro prowled closer to the cell, dressed in the black and purple of any common prisoner. Lance caught the caution and guilt reflected in those insanely golden eyes and then dropped his gaze and didn’t look up a second time. The carefulness with which Shiro’s clone approached him held something else underneath it, too, a powerful riptide that had already been overshadowing whatever negative emotion Kuro felt at seeing the result of his actions in the arena. Staring at the floor, his thoughts ran into each other frantically. There had to be a way to trick him into getting him out of here. He didn’t want to take Kuro back to the castle if he could help it… but if that helped, he could at least offer.

All the disdain and pity from their previous encounter had seemed to mutate into something else entirely, something _hungry,_ and the thought made the shadow of a smirk creep back to Lance’s face. He could work with that.

Inhaling, he felt something catch against the cuffs as he tried to pull against them and realised that he was still wearing the thin band that Coran had given to them earlier. He had his escape route, if he could just stall for time there was no way that the others wouldn’t be able to find him. The thought that if he could see him now Keith would probably be chastising him for running off and being reckless wasn’t an irony that was lost on him but he’d be glad to see even that instantly recognisable mullet right now. Instead all he was left with was the steady thrum of the engines that held the ship stationary in space and the heated look he could feel digging into him from the direction of the bars that Kuro had stopped in front of.

Raising his head he tried to summon all the bravado that he had left despite he was so scared he was hoping that since his hands were tied and below eye level the Galran clone couldn’t see them shake and curl into fists as Lance shot him a smirk.  
“Mm. The last time someone looked at me like that we didn’t get out of bed all weekend, _good times.”_ Puffing out his chest a little, he forced the line through chapped lips and didn’t quite make as good on his normal, well-practised smirk as he wanted to. The finger guns, though, he could still do. Even if the buzzing of the handcuffs energy field accompanied the familiar gesture. God he hated these things.

“Cute bravado, but it won’t save you.” Kuro replied languidly, metal clanking on metal as a clawed, silver-purple hand rested against the bars. They fizzled out, going transparent, and then Kuro stepped into the cell and Lance’s eyes widened. That was how he could get out of here. His only way out unassisted, unless he wanted to be escorted by a Druid or two again.There was something darkly playful in Kuro’s voice that made his core run hot, and he frowned, chewing at his lip as he tried to smother the invasive thought. How many times had his dreams strayed to this kind of situation but with Shiro? To being subject to a rescue that turned into a warning ‘lesson’ from their leader on not getting caught? “You’re blushing, Lance.”

He feels the heat in his face increase at the way Kuro says his name, frowning at the accusation, but doesn't try to refute it. It would be pointless and in all honesty there are much more important things to focus on right now. His helmet’s gone and he might well still be sat inside the black spot on the castle’s sensors, leaving his team with no idea where he was taken. He’s still thankful that he spent enough time with Coran to figure out how to set up automatic protocols for Blue, keeping enough of a distance that she was away from the Galra ship and undetected without going far enough to hear him call.. or whatever telepathic shenanigans are involved that keep them connected. He's never been sure and the ongoing dispute as to whether the Lions are more a product of magic or of science is still raging between Pidge and Allura. If he can just get to a part of the ship where the hull is thin enough to punch through, Blue can get to him and he can get the hell off this ship all on his own. As long as he can persuade Kuro to get him out of here before any Druids come back.

"It's warm." he lies, trying to cling on to his cool and collected attitude. It is in fact not warm in the slightest, and they both know it. The icy vacuum of space is only a layer of metal away and the cold is leeching through it rather efficiently. "What're you doing coming to stare at me, anyway?"

"Boredom. I don’t get much free time and now you’re here. You’re _new."_ His words are succinct and quiet and so reminiscent of Shiro that it hurts as he steps towards Lance, the bars flickering back to full strength as soon as he’s through them to lock them both inside the cell. Lance presses himself against the wall as the clone advances on him, and holding Kuro’s gaze is like staring down a shotgun barrel. He looks almost identical to Shiro apart from his eye colour, down the white forelock and the scar across his face, but Lance can tell that he isn’t. Shiro has never had the same look in his eyes as Lance is staring at now. Shiro has looked lost, haunted, but he was never spiteful with it. He never hated the world around him for causing him all his pain and frustration and it was obvious, at least to Lance, that Kuro did.

He hated his own existence, he hated the Druids for creating him and that he was powerless to either end or betray them, he hated Lance, for being free to do what he could not. He hated the legacy of the person he physically resembled. He hated and hated and hated until everything was reduced to dust, meaningless and crushed under the weight of it. When Lance had seen him smile as they fought, it was a display of joy tainted by iciness and sarcasm, and Shiro’s smiles were a gesture that could convey so much more than that. Even his name was the antithesis to the person he had been made to model. The fact that Haggar knew enough japanese to select it in the first place was a worrying amount of research into Earth, too.

“Huh. Y’know…” Lance was aware he’d been silent for too long, and slipping on the mask of a cocky smirk to meet Kuro’s own amusement was almost too easy. “..there's a saying, back on Earth, that the cure for boredom is curiosity."  
"Oh? And what's the cure for curiosity?" Black fabric rustled alongside two neat footsteps as Kuro came to a stop in front of him, towering over his seated body. Lance licked his lips and he didn’t miss the way those gold eyes followed the movement, swallowing.  
“There isn’t one.”  
“Then, despite it being an exercise in futility, I’m sure you won’t mind answering some questions for me.” He resisted the urge to let out a sigh of annoyance as Kuro crossed his legs under him and sat, barely an arms length from him. “Not like you have anywhere to go.”  
“Not yet. The cavalry will no doubt arrive shortly.” Lance replied, not missing the sceptical scoff that greeted his words and remembering Kuro’s earlier taunt about no-one rushing to get there and save him. He was wrong, he had to be. It wasn’t like they would leave without him even if Blue did go back to the castle ship without him in tow and Pidge managed to get away unhindered. Voltron kind of needed both legs to function. _‘They’ll come, I just have to stall for time.’_  
“Oh, no doubt.” Kuro replied, obviously not believing it for a second. “But more importantly, I know you could have fought back in the arena. I’ve been going back through my.. _his_ memories about training with you ever since you turned up… why wouldn’t you fight me?”

“I did fight you. You won.” He pointed out, raising an eyebrow at the way Kuro’s frown deepened and knowing it was being taken as a non-answer. It hurt him to admit it, but Kuro _had_ won… and likely still would have if Lance had put everything he had into that fight, instead of being held back by the overwhelming pity of realising that what he saw in front of him was the only reality that Kuro knew. Come to think, if Kuro had all of Shiro’s memories then why were they keeping him cooped up in an arena? Why weren’t they using what Kuro knew to try and pre-empt Voltron? Or try to break the social bonds of the team so that they couldn’t form it anymore? “It’s you. This.. This cloning thing. That’s what they’re hiding from Zarkon.” Realisation dawned in Lance’s eyes at the same time as a cloud of total confusion settled over Kuro’s, the redirection of his train of thought jarring.

“Are they?” The empty-sounding counter was only off putting if he kept going on the assumption that Kuro was actually a willing party, here. It seemed more and move obvious that he was as much as prisoner as Lance. “They.. keep talking about the Black Lion… but..” The protective layer of cold cynicism from Kuro seemed to shudder, then, suddenly transparent against a glimpse of insecurity. Then it was pushed away with the rationale of someone accepting things that they couldn’t change without more information that wasn’t incoming and he got back on topic. “I.. Nevermind. You’re changing the subject, Lance. You could have shot me and you didn’t. _Why?”_

He was leaning further forward, now, his hands slamming flat against the metal behind Lance as he crowded him in and Lance frantically wracked his brain for a way to calm him down. He could manage Keith’s frustration, he could talk Pidge through her rambling to get her to a point where things made sense for everyone as she worked on a problem, he could offer Hunk enough rationality to stop him panicking. There must be something he could do here to get Kuro on their side. He just didn’t know Shiro well enough to have any tactics to extrapolate and apply now, and he’d be lying if he said that didn’t sting a little. The other man was close, now, shallow breaths tingling over Lance’s face in his agitated state, and if Lance thought his face had been warm before it must be bright red now as he struggled to find a place to put his eyes. This wasn’t a good time for his stupid hero crush to be overwhelming him, especially given it wasn’t even like this was actually Shiro in such close quarters with him, but here he was. This was his life now. Trapped on a prison ship deep in enemy territory of the worst kind with his own would-be killer practically in his lap, and he was _still_ thinking with his dick, apparently. _‘What a time to be alive.’_

“I.. Ah..” Stuttering was the most he could do for a moment before he mentally shook himself, trying to recapture the sense of purpose he’d woken up with in the arena. He only had himself to fall back on here until he could regroup with Blue and Pidge and that hadn’t changed. Kuro was as much of a liability as he was any possible asset right now. All he has do to is breathe, think it out, and he’ll be fine. “Look.. I know you attacked me. But you’re as much a product of your environment as I am, right? So… So you’re alone. And you’re scared, and you hate losing to anything, least of all something you’ve prepared for.” Kuro’s expression twisted from anger to bitterness and then eventually neutrality, but he still didn’t move further away, seeming to either not notice that he was virtually in Lance’s lap or to be quite comfortable with the position. “But you don’t have to stay here and do what they want. Yes, I didn’t fight you at first because I thought you were Shiro… but then I just didn’t see any reason to.”

There was a moment or two of silence before Kuro sighed, seeming to come to some internal decision that he knew was probably against his own self-interest, and reached behind Lance to the cuffs. They clicked and fell loose and it was only when Kuro’s right hand retracted that he realised what had happened, the cuffs taking the Galran energy signature in the clone’s prosthetic as authorisation to unlock.  
“Don’t make me regret this.” Lance hesitantly rested his hands on Kuro’s shoulders, then, the weight in his lap prompting him to offer support. He could feel lines ingrained into the skin at the nape of Kuro’s neck and swallowed around a dry throat. His heart dropped when he realised just what he could feel under his fingers, the barcode thin but unmistakable, and then a dangerous anger bubbled beneath his surface. Kuro could have spent his time in here doing anything but instead he’d sought honest answers to a few questions and then let Lance go when he received them. He didn’t deserve what was happening here no matter what he’d been created for. “Haggar is not gentle when thwarting attempted escapes.”

**_“This is an automated warning.”_** What was undoubtedly Pidge’s intervention made Lance’s heart jump in his chest and he looked towards the barred door so fast he could swear he felt a few neck vertebrae complain. He was well versed in this tactic of hers by now - fake an engine overload, get everyone off the ship as fast as possible and cause complete chaos to slip out in. By the time anyone realised the engines were fine, the team was usually long gone. **_“All hands, abandon ship. Critical engine failure. This is an automated warning. All hands, abandon ship. Critical engine failure.”_**

“I won’t. We’re getting out of here.” The repeating warning over the intercom was already fading into the background of his concentration as he slipped out from under Kuro’s arms braced against the wall and got up, trying to keep back a hiss at the pain from the movement. His limbs were heavy all over but this was going to be his one and only chance and he knew Kuro could get them back outside. He could do the rest of the work from there.  
“We?” There was the briefest of moments, then, as Kuro didn’t move out of his space and he leant forward, the consequences of all of this raced across his mind at a million miles per hour but he couldn’t help really _looking_ at him for the first time. Yes, he was a copy of Shiro and that certainly didn’t hurt his attractiveness, but there was just enough individuality that Lance could also appreciate him as his own person - or at least begin to see the differences. All the frustration Hunk must have felt with him over the last few months landed squarely on his shoulders as he saw a spookily familiar look in Kuro’s eyes. The look of someone measuring themselves against an impossible standard and doubting their own self worth because they couldn’t measure up to it.  
“Yes, we. As in you’re coming too.”  
“You can’t be—”  
“—Shut up.”  
“Allura wouldn’t allow—”  
_“—Kuro.”_ It was the first time he’d heard his name from anyone’s mouth but Haggar’s and it brought Kuro up short. Lance’s smile was aiming for the kind of determined ‘don't mess with me’ look he instantly recognised from the few times he’d been totally serious with the group in the past and there wasn’t much he could do if he didn’t want to crush both their hopes. More and more curiosities seemed to keep cropping up the longer he spent in the Blue Paladin’s company.  
“Fine.” Kuro’s expression was partially hidden in darkness as he braced one hand against the floor to get to his feet, and the dark grin Lance caught on his face was almost enough to take Lance back to the first time he’d seen him - in the arena, powerful and loving it. “Guess the hunt’s on again.”  
“Again?”

Springing to his feet, Kuro walked back over to the bars and Lance followed him, only to be met with an affable chuckle and a shrug.  
“You don’t seriously think I never tried to escape, do you, Lance?” The brunet had to concede the point that it’d be pretty foolish to expect that. Kuro had the advantage of remembering how Shiro escaped, he supposed, and he definitely had enough motivation to try in an _‘anything he can do I can do better’_ kind of way. It would be amusing to see if Kuro and Shiro went through a phase with the same kind of rivalry as he and Keith had but somehow he didn’t think everything was going to be that simple.  
“Yeah, alright, fair point.”

Given that his armour had returned to the ship, he’d been left without his bayard, but Kuro was more than enough of a walking weapon for that not to matter and they made a surprisingly efficient escape team. Short, quick bursts of movement kept them out of the way of evacuating squads of Galra, the drones having already started to pack themselves into fighters to free the bigger ships for the actual soldiers. Panting, the two of them came to a stop in an alcove and Lance felt warmth pool in his chest at the sight of open space through a narrow porthole in the hull. _Freedom._  
There was something else bothering him, though.  
“Why haven’t we seen any Druids with these squads?” He muttered, frowning and wishing that he had his rifle in his hands. “I don’t like that.”  
“Exactly what I was thinking.” Kuro replied, an equally sour frown on his face.

“Lance! Lance, _come in,_ you piece of shit. I did not just spend the last half a day crawling around the vents in here for you to—”  
Jumping a mile, Lance clapped a hand to his wrist in shocked reflex, remembering the thin black bracelet Coran had given them. He’d thought it had been damaged by the water but apparently their enemy was having no such luck today. He had some means of communication that didn’t rely on his helmet.  
“…was that Pidge?” Kuro looked totally bemused for a few seconds and Lance smiled placidly.  
“Space makes her stressed.”  
“Where the hell have you been?” There was an entirely reasonable amount of panic underneath her anger and Lance sighed. If this was what she was like he hesitated to think about the ear-bending incoming when Hunk got a hold of him. “Your armour came back to the ship without you and Allura said the Druids had got you, and.. and I t-thought—”  
“They did get me.” Lance replied, trying to keep his voice down as he followed Kuro’s lead through more of the twisting corridors. He was starting to get his bearings and hopefully they were out of the section of the ship that wasn’t visible on the scanners if Pidge could get in touch with him like this. “But I’m fine. Still got all my limbs, even. I don’t think they appreciated my pick-up lines, though.”  
“You _ass_ , we were all worried sick.” Pidge’s response was tellingly watery but it sounded like she was forgiving him already - and calming down, a fact for which he would be eternally grateful. A calm Pidge was a Pidge at top efficiency. “They must’ve taken you into the section of the ship our scanners can’t get at, I was trying to find a way in through the vents but every time I got near, something spotted me.”  
“Well, I’m good now, and you will not believe who I found.” Finally, they had stopped by a window large enough for Blue to use as a partial entryway, and Lance watched as Kuro skidded to a stop and turned to follow him. He was glad that he’d somehow been able to make the clone risk this, knowing exactly how much of a risk it would probably be for him. “Later, though. Gotta get out of here. Get to your lion, Pidge, this whole ship needs to be blown out of the sky.”  
“Why?”

Thoughts of the tank ripped through his mind, then, battling for equal space along the steady bond as he called for Blue with his mind. The lion responded almost instantly, wrapping around the core of his consciousness with a protective fury he hadn’t yet experienced but was really glad for right at that second. Kuro must have gathered what was about to happen, grabbing an oxygen mask and jet pack from the several just hanging at intervals along the hallways and slapping them on just in time for him to steady himself against Lance. The Blue lion’s head rammed through the thick glass and the vacuum of space took almost immediate effect around her, but Lance wasn’t concerned about that as he kicked off from the floor and sped towards Blue in time to be consumed, pulling Kuro with him. The jaws of the lion slid shut and he scrambled to his feet, leaving Kuro where he’d landed to race down a short corridor and up a set of steps so that he could slide into his pilot’s seat. _‘It’s good to be back, girl.’_ Allowing himself a contented sigh, he patted the dashboard fondly before taking a firm hold of the grips on the thruster levers to either side of him and pushed. Blue’s purr resonated in him and for the first time since he woke up before this whole mess of a day started, he felt at home.  
“Because there’s a lab here, that’s what the Druids are hiding.” He responded, glad to not have to hold his wrist to his mouth to talk anymore now that he was back in his Lion, riding the wave of the comforting purr in his mind to avoid thinking too much about what had happened before he woke up in the cell. “I saw that place and just trust me it needs to go up in flames.”

“You got it, Lance, just tell us where we’re aiming.”  
“Keith!” He never thought hearing _that_ voice again would make him so glad but there it was. “Good to finally have some back up around here.” Pidge was probably going to kneecap him for that one, on second thought, but such was life. He could spot the Black and Yellow flying towards them as well, momentarily distracted by Kuro appearing to the left of his chair and leaning against the wall as he watched the view outside.  
“Good to have you back, buddy.”  
“It really is, Hunk.”  
“Pidge, are you clear?” Shiro’s voice was odd, now that he’d been hearing it come from Kuro this whole time, but Lance was grateful for his presence all the same. Facing down this particular ship must be hard for him even without going inside.  
“I’m clear! Light it up, guys!”

The Green lion shot out of stealth away from the ion cannon perched atop the ship as the same time as an explosion left it little more than a charred husk, and without it the ship was defenceless now that they were more than capable of handling drone fighter squads. They made short work of it and Lance felt his mind settle as the entire aft section of the ship crumbled in on itself as all five lions went on the offensive, flames only momentary before the vacuum of space choked them out. As they turned back to the castle, they missed the tiny command ship detaching from the bottom of the hull and speeding away until it vanished on the horizon.

* * *

As soon as Blue is safely down in her hangar, Lance rests himself forward against the dashboard in front of him, closing his eyes and trying to mentally take stock of everything that had happened. If he’d thought be was tired before it was nothing on how he felt now, his muscles a twitchy mess of tension and exhaustion and his heartbeat thudding dully in his ears. His broken rib was still a background throb and he’d definitely need a healing pod for that.

“Lance? Are you alright?” A hand on his shoulder roused him and he blinked his eyes open slowly, turning to look at Kuro.

He was purely anxious, now, the first emotion Lance had seen on his face that appeared genuine and uncoloured by having to keep up appearances on the Galran ship where he’d been born into the world, and in-spite of himself Lance couldn’t help the small smile. He was sure that even if they did have some disagreements at first Kuro would fit in with them eventually, if he was as bad as the Druids he wouldn’t have been able to go this long without cracking and he’d had a million opportunities to betray him on the ship if he’d wanted to. He had been the one leading Lance around, after all.  
“C’mon, dude. You’ll be fine.” Staggering to his feet, Lance was grateful as he felt Kuro slip an arm around his head and use his weight to support him to the off ramp out of Blue’s mouth.  
“And _you_ need a healing pod.” Kuro replied, frowning as he slipped an arm under Lance’s knees and picked him up in a princess-carry. “Up you go, Lance. I’m not making you walk all the way to the med bay.”  
“Well, just let me state for the record I’m not exactly comfortable with being cradled like a damsel in distress.” Lance pointed out, frowning and telling himself _he was **not** blushing, thanks very much,_ as Kuro smirked at him and gave a tiny shrug, hitching Lance a little higher to get a better grip under him.  
“You just don’t want to look like a damsel in distress in front of Keith, huh?”  
“Shut up.”

Kuro wasn’t exactly surprised when the first thing he saw as he carried Lance down the ramp were all four of the other paladins watching the Blue lion with their weapons out. Allura and Coran were with them, and he watched in grim silence as their eyes made the inevitable move from him to Shiro and back. Shiro himself had frozen, every muscle tensing as the light from his prosthetic dimmed down abruptly.  
“Lance… y-you’re back.” Allura tries her hardest to retain her smile but it’s fraught and everyone can see through it as she steps forward, clearly not sure how to cope with the very obvious elephant in the hangar.  
“Yeah, great. I’m also pretty sure I broke a rib so can we stop staring like fish and maybe get me to a pod?” Lance replied, trying to prod the rest of them along with a little pointedness to his words. “Kuro rescued me, you can stop watching him like he’s about to slit my throat. If he wanted to do that he wouldn’t have led me out of the prison section of the ship so I could get to Blue.”  
“Kuro?” Keith’s voice shook a little and beside him it didn’t look like Shiro was actually seeing much of anything, right now, his shaking visible even from a distance and his hands pressing to his ears as his shoulders hunched forward. “You _named_ it? You can’t just.. Drag strays back here with you, Lance. What if that thing kills us all in our sleep?!”  
“Actually, ‘it’ _named itself.”_ Kuro hissed, clutching Lance a little tighter to his chest. Lance was the only person here who actually wanted him to be here, he knew it would be like that, but it didn’t mean that seeing them all lined up against him didn’t hurt. It didn’t mean that seeing his mere presence bring Shiro to a mental standstill didn’t hurt. “Now are you going to help Lance or not?”  
“Kuro, don’t. He’s scared, he doesn’t mean to lash out.” Lance replied, squeezing Kuro’s shoulder in a movement that he was silently grateful for the support of. At the same time, Allura turned to Keith with an appeasing look. She was as happy as him about this Galran clone’s presence on her ship, and admittedly Lance’s judgement of character could use some work at times, but it was true that if Kuro hadn’t wanted to help the Blue Paladin then there wasn’t anything forcing him. On the contrary it looked like he’d both taken a huge risk to bring him here and essentially just betrayed the Empire to ensure Lance’s safety. They didn’t have to trust him, not yet, but they did owe him a considerable debt.  
“Keith, please.” After a moment or two in which they locked glances, the concern shining through in Keith’s eyes a lot clearer than any flare of anger against Lance for bringing a possible enemy onto their ship. “I know you’re worried but Shiro needs your help, right now. Focus on what you _can_ do and leave the rest to us.”  
“Yeah, you’re right.. Sorry, Allura.” After a moment of awkward shuffling, Keith moved around to block Shiro’s view and began talking to him in hushed japanese, trying to talk him down and get him back to them so that they could move to a different room where Kuro wasn’t going to set him off again.

That dealt with, Allura turned back to Kuro and Lance, motioning for the others to drop their weapons. Neither Pidge or Hunk looked happy about it, sharing a glance that Lance knew well enough to make his heart sink, but they remained silent and allowed her to carry on.  
“Welcome, Kuro.” If her voice shook over the unfamiliar name, she made a valiant effort to contain it, motioning to the hallway. “Let me show you to the healing pods and we’ll get Lance fixed up before we talk about anything.”  
“I remember the way myself thanks, Princess.” He sneered back at her, noticing Lance’s huff of disapproval but unable to help his irritation as he stalked off and left the rest of them standing in his wake.

Lance did his best to swallow back the pained whimper as he was set gingerly on his feet by Kuro, the tension creeping up his muscles made worse by the sudden addition of his bodyweight. The others following with tense faces but not getting any closer than Allura was letting them. She watched in silence as Lance and Kuro shared a look before he walked stiffly to the pod and stepped inside, and as he turned around to swap out of the under-armour bodysuit and into something more comfortable for the duration of his time in the pod she looked away, eyes widening.  
There was a barcode, tiny but visible to her eyes where it might not have been to the other Paladin’s at this distance given her race’s improved sight, etched just beneath Lance’s right collarbone, and it was spookily similar to one she’d seen on Kuro’s neck.  
She wondered if Lance even knew it was there.

* * *

“N-No.. Blue, I’m here! I’m.. Y-You’ve got the wrong person! Come back!” Haggar stood and watched, unmoved, as Lance slammed his fist against the smooth glass of the porthole, the sight of all five lions wrecking the ship he’d been trapped on fading away into the distance and blinking out as the ship slipped into a wormhole bound for the main fleet and her real laboratories. There was only so much she could do out in the field in such mean accommodation, but once they were deep in Galran space and back on the command ship, Lance would never escape her, and it didn’t take a genius to know that from the fading hope in his eyes that he knew it too. He still remembered seeing the clone thrashing in the tank, scratching absentmindedly at the barcode tattooed into his skin just underneath his right collarbone even through the skin there was already an angry, marked red because he’d been repeating the motion far too much already.

“They abandoned you.” She informed him, smirking despite her attempt at a somewhat motherly tone. “They took the clone with them and abandoned you, and now.. He’s free to do what he wants. Wait until they’re weakest before he strikes them down, probably. He even fooled Kuro.”

The castle-ship was gone, Blue’s soothing cold fading from his mind, and he didn’t care if Haggar saw the tears that tracked down his face as he slumped against the glass and ended up kneeling on the floor, his mind spinning. They couldn’t just leave him, they couldn’t… they’d notice, surely?  
“I’ll save them.” His sadness turned to fury, then. He could never be angry at Hunk and Pidge and he very much doubted Coran would take this lying down. But Allura? Shiro? They were experienced enough to know when sacrifices had to be made, and Keith shared the sentiment - and that was if they even realised that they weren’t interacting with a Galran plant that was just waiting to turn on them.  
“You’ll have to be much stronger if you want to do that.” Haggar pointed out, the smallest of ideas forming in her mind. “We can help you there.”  
“Why would you?” He didn’t want to believe her for an instant but right now, this was the only way he could think of to make sure that he wasn’t turned into lab fodder. Or a robeast, that seem the kind of cruel irony that the Druids appreciated. If he could just hold out long enough, maybe he could get back to his team and save them before it was too late.  
“As I said before, you are a lot more useful to me alive.” He had to concede that point but that didn’t mean he wasn’t miserable, staring down at the steel floor with a shudder as he felt Haggar lay a cold hand on his shoulder gently. “Say goodbye, Lance. Say goodbye and come with me.”  
Lance looked up at the stars, at the place where he’d last seen Blue, and felt a whole new kind of iciness steal over him as he stood and placed his hand back on the glass. His breath caught in his throat as he swallowed down his tears and turned away.  
“Goodbye.”


	4. Mirror (Part 1)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mirror/Reflection - Shiro accepts the reality of having his clone on the same ship. The rest of the team is somewhat more uncomfortable.  
> As ever, find me at mystitrinqua on tumblr or twitter if you would like to scream with me about these dorks. :D Unbeta'd, please excuse errors.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So sorry guys. This chapter happens directly alongside S2 Ep4 'Greening The Cube'. It is longer than I initially thought (and I didn't get everything planned in, so that will be to come in part 2, which covers Ep5 'Eye of the Storm') and on top of that I moved house and lost internet for a week or so... so this is me, crawling over the finish line. I'm happy with how this turned out, though. Season three has just made things... interesting...
> 
> For the music lovers, ongoing listening suggestions:  
> 'O Children' - Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds  
> 'Innocence' - Halestorm  
> 'Sinister Kid' - The Black Keys
> 
> *whispers* Feed the author with kudos and comments <3

It is a truth universally acknowledged that when Lance is hurt, Hunk stress-bakes.

 

With Lance safely tucked within the confines of a healing pod for the foreseeable future and nothing better to occupy themselves with Pidge and Hunk inevitably found themselves in the kitchen. While the anxiety that always came with an injured teammate warred within her against the bone-deep exhaustion from spending so long climbing through the prison ship’s vent system, she couldn’t bring herself to sleep and the thought of joining Lance in the tight, cramped space of a pod after spending hours crawling through spaces not much bigger than herself made her queasy. All that was left to do was watch as Hunk dug through the supplies to find something to experiment with.

“-I mean, I know Lance is a nice guy. He wants to assume the best in everyone, I get it,” she tuned back in to Hunk still rambling to himself as he threw together some dangerously neon coloured substances into a mixing bowl cup by cup, “but sometimes you just have to… I dunno? Maybe _not_ bring along everyone who seems nice and is also in a bad situation? Keith’s right, man. He’s gonna kill us all in our sleep, if we’re lucky.”

“I’m sure it’s fine, Hunk.” She replied, wishing Lance was here to rationalise it in a way that would actually sink in. No-one else seemed to have much luck getting through to Hunk when he was in a funk like this. “Allura would have sent him straight to one of those tube prisons if she thought he was an immediate risk.” Pidge was still questioning why Allura _hadn’t,_ but she wasn’t going to mention that now. Just seeing the way Shiro had reacted was enough to make the decision for her but she could appreciate that for Allura, these things weren’t so easy. They had to find out what Kuro knew, how similar he really was to Shiro, whether he could pilot a lion because Shiro could…

“Yeah.. Yeah, you’re right.” There was a faint glow as Hunk prepped one of the small oven-like stations jutting smoothly out of the wall, placing some presets for temperature and fan usage before returning to his collection of ingredients. “It’s just.. If Shiro got that bad just seeing him for the first time and Allura lets him stay it’s not like they can avoid each other. We need Shiro to keep us all centred. I love you guys, but sometimes even choosing snacks for movie nights is like herding cats.”

“I’m sure it was just the initial shock.. Shiro reacted like that to anything that reminded him of the arena for a while, didn’t he?” Pidge pointed out, shrugging. It would just take a little careful exposure to manage and then he’d bounce back, she was sure. “I’d be pretty fucked up, too, if my Galra-engineered twin just strolled out of Blue with Lance in her arms. Not that I can carry Lance like that, of course, but for the sake of the hypothesis.”

“Not just that, though. Doesn’t it feel like we got away too easily?” Hunk replied, wishing not for the first time that he had enough time to get Coran to point the altean equivalent of a blender out to him. “That ship could have given us real trouble, and they all just deserted it and left.”

“Well, yeah. They thought the engine was going to blow up.” She replied, smirking. “Works every time.”

“What the.. What did you let us come running in for if the engines were going to blow?”

“’Cause it wasn’t a real risk.” She could understand Hunk’s concern but the upshot of having hours alone with the same computer network was that she could really get comfy and have some fun with it. “I’ve created a fake readout and I just insert it over the top so it looks like the engines are overloading when they’re fine. Don’t worry about it.”

“Ooh, good one!” Hunk relaxed again at that, giving his spoon a test lick which she watched over the top of her laptop with what could only be described as trepidation. As much as she trusted Hunk’s culinary skills, in terms of taste any food substance the castle produced was still a risk in her eyes. “D’you think Allura would want some cookies?”

“I think Lance would be offended if he didn’t get first dibs.” She pointed out, chuckling. For all the teasing she was happy that Lance had managed to get him the hell out of whatever situation he’d found himself in.

“Hm.. true.”

“I’m just.. I hope cookies are all it’s going to take to cheer him up. He wouldn’t say what he saw in the laboratory we torched.” Pidge sighed and Hunk’s face twisted into a frown at that as he made a mental note to quietly press that particular issue, if Lance wasn’t forthcoming with the information when he was healed. “This is probably the first time I was glad _not_ to find my family on a prison ship..”

“Me too. That wouldn’t be pretty.” He replied, smiling as he glanced out of one of the nearby windows, his spoon pausing its movement in the bowl for a moment or two. “They’re still out there somewhere. We’ll find them eventually, Pidge.”

“I hope so.”

 

“Hey, Hunk? You there?” Keith’s voice came over the intercom, still a little frayed at the edges with worry, but it made the tight feeling die back well enough to know that if he was able to divide his attention away from Shiro then their leader was, in fact, a bit further back up to full strength.

“In the kitchens.” Pidge replied, pulling her laptop slightly closer to her as the still suspiciously magenta ‘cookie dough’ mixture splattered a little too closely to her tech for her to be entirely comfortable with sitting in the blast zone much longer. “You guys okay? Lance has got another hour or so before his pod’s egg timer pops, so Hunk’s doing what he does best.”

“Cake?”

“Cookies. Send Shiro down here our way if he needs something to do, there’s plenty of washing up piling up around Hunk, and Allura wants to see you.” It was nothing they couldn’t get done via a dishwasher, but it would give Shiro something to feel helpful doing and keep his mind busy with.

“Alright.”

 

* * *

 

Keith was still fighting to get the totally shaken look on Shiro’s face off his mind as he traversed the ship, the kitchens where he’d left him in Pidge and Hunk’s safe hands a fair distance from the bridge where he was expecting to find Allura. It was the only place he could think of to look for them after she and Kuro weren’t anywhere near the holding cells where Sendak had been, admittedly walking a little faster when he passed the healing pod chamber to find Coran standing watch over the one that was still working on fixing Lance’s broken rib and various other small cuts and bruises. He would readily admit to being the least socially graceful of the team but even he could guess that leaving Kuro and Allura alone in a room together wasn’t going to end well.

They weren’t having a conversation on the bridge, either, but there was a door open at one end that led to a small office-like space that was probably originally a briefing point. The team had their pre-mission chats out in the open but he didn’t think Allura wanted to give their guest a lot of space to move around. It wasn’t until he realised that they were already talking that he stopped short, Lance’s name not something he expected to hear from Allura in such a worried tone of voice.

“What about him?” Kuro’s response was level, accompanied by what sounded like the slight squeak of stretching fabric that suggested straining against some form of restraint. At least she’d had the sense to tie him down. The disinterest in Kuro’s voice was already shortening what precious little space Keith had for him in terms of his temper, though. Lance had saved him from the Galra’s hands and he had no right to be so impassive about that.

“I saw a barcode, like yours.”

“Oh, I get it. You think Lance isn’t your Lance. You think he’s like me.” Although it wasn’t Shiro, it was still Shiro’s voice. That much he’d picked up on when Kuro had first come out of Blue. There were very few differences but certain things - like his voice, which had a rougher, colder quality to it than Shiro’s - that were really obvious once you noticed them. “Sorry, Princess, I can’t answer that one.”

“Can’t, or won’t?” Allura challenged.

“Can’t. I don’t know whether he is or not, I only saw them bring him in.” Evidently that hadn’t been the answer Allura had been hoping for, a ‘whump’ sound followed by a sigh suggesting she’d flopped down heavily into a chair. “If he is, though, Haggar didn’t have long enough to mentally program him. Even if she did.. it’s nothing to me, I’m safe if he goes off the deep end. All I’d have to do is sit and watch.”

There was a momentary lull and it was the only way he was getting in there without interrupting something substantial, so Keith pushed the door open. For all he knew, Kuro was lying. He hadn’t seen anything on Lance himself… but he hadn’t been there when they got him in the pod because of being occupied with more important things like making sure Shiro breathed through his panic attack.

 

Stepping forward, his approached triggered the sensor to complete the full slide open and shut of the doorway, leaving Kuro trapped in the room with them as he flicked the lock. This didn’t sound like a conversation any of the others needed to be privy to.

Kuro was tied to a chair, heavy duty straps crossing his chest and arms to keep him down. Allura was sat across from him having manoeuvred the desk out from between them, and neither of them looked up as he entered, walking behind her to take the one other unoccupied seat.

“Your lack of co-operation really isn’t helping your case for innocence.” Allura said, frowning as her hands twitched where they were folded in her lap. Her back straightened a little as she sat forward in her seat, recovering a more composed posture that didn’t show the frustration in her voice from a few moments before. “So I’ll ask again. Why did you help Lance?”

That wasn’t what they’d been talking about at all but after a brief glance at his face Kuro seemed happy to go along with the topic shift. It seemed as far as both of them were concerned the fewer people on the ship who knew about the question mark hovering over Lance’s head the better.

“There’s no point answering your questions if you don’t believe my answers, Princess.”

His answer was so smooth it came off as sickly, and although Allura was clearly the one in control of the situation and Kuro’s spookily familiar face was twisted into a frown there was still a sense that he was the one at an advantage. It wasn’t like he had much to lose but his life and it was debatable how much he was in the right state of mind to value that, given what he’d just escaped from.

“The way I see it, you don’t have a choice.” She replied icily. “You trespassed in the Blue lion to get here knowing that once you were onboard, it would become my decision whether you live or die.”

Sneering, Kuro leant forward as much as the restraints over his forearms and waist would allow, the belts keeping him pinned straining against his musculature in a way that dragged Keith’s mind back to seeing Shiro unconscious, pinned down by Garrison scientists who wouldn’t believe him about the Galra. Who would have had him hidden away rather than retract their own story about how his mistake killed the Kerberos mission’s crew. If making choices like this were what leaders had to do then he wasn’t sure he’d ever be ready. There was no way to tell if Kuro had only had good intentions when he rescued Lance, or if he’d done it just to get on the ship, and they hadn’t had enough time to observe him and make a decision either way… but Allura clearly already thought she couldn’t take that risk. It was the first time he’d really stared down the truth of what Voltron being so important to the universe really meant, and what they might have to do to protect it.

“Then choose, _Allura.”_ The sound of her name, so scathing in what was still uncannily Shiro’s voice, had them both unable to look at anything but their captive and suddenly Keith didn’t feel like the situation was under control after all, not in the slightest. “You chose to kill what was left of your own father to protect your ship, surely you can be selfish enough to do it again if you think it’s worth it.”

“How.. do you know that?”

“I was created to replace Shiro… so, Haggar gave me his memories.” Although it sounded too much like something out of a sci-fi novel to be true, Keith didn’t really have the luxury of forgetting he was practically _living_ in a sci-fi novel, now. It explained how he’d known the way to the healing pods as if he was an intimately familiar with the castle’s layout, no guidance required. “She said she stole some of his quintessence when they fought… and I was already knocking around, so..”

“That’s why his wound was so bad.” It made sense, now, how the glowing, jagged lines that Haggar had carved through Shiro’s armour had given him so much trouble. Quite aside from being deep wounds the head Druid had been carving into his soul, if what he had gathered from Allura’s brief explanation of quintessence was right.

The princess shot him a sharp look and Keith bit his lip, leaning back in his chair. Clearly she still expected to be leading the conversation and if he wanted to watch he needed to stay quiet.

“Yes.” Kuro’s attention switched to him, then, a cold appraising look he wasn’t entirely sure he could stomach right now. “She’d been making physical copies from a DNA sample but that’s.. Not enough. Not for what she wants out of it. Physical copies alone can’t pilot a Lion of Voltron in the same way the original can.”

It was the first time he’d genuinely seen so much anger on Allura’s face at the mention of their Lions, and Keith didn’t have time to react as she stood up and pressed her palm against the cool metal of Kuro’s prosthetic arm, the small crystalline scales under her eyes seeming to glow threateningly as she held his gaze.

“Then you were created to steal the Black Lion.”

“I don’t know the answer to that.” Kuro avoided her eyes this time, and the difference was noticeable.

“Either tell me the truth,” the glow became more definite, then, and Keith’s heart lurched as Kuro inhaled sharply, his breath a quiet hiss of pain as the prosthetic lit up purple along the ridges underneath her fingertips. “Or _be silent._ We don’t have time to waste and I don’t want to hear you mention my father ever again. I don’t care what fake memories Haggar has stuffed your head with.”

“Y’know.. you and her would get along just fine, if this is what your persuasion tactics are.”

 

Allura might not be able to see it, but Keith could - Kuro was straining harder than ever against the bindings, starting to autonomously lean away from Allura’s presence at his side, away from the pain, his fists clenching and unclenching, and ice slid it's way down Keith’s back. He knew that tactic, and he knew exactly who he knew it from. Kuro’s words had been quieter, too, fuzzier as the pain spreading up his arm increased.

“I said be quiet, _Galra.”_ The princess hissed, and Keith felt himself half glued to his seat with the unreal sensation of watching Allura torture a possibly innocent person. He knew she was grieving for her planet, that she had some unresolved anger issues, but this… this just wasn’t right.

“I already told you once, I helped Lance off the ship because he was injured and I wanted to escape.” Kuro’s voice was shaking and desperate now as Allura’s grip on his arm twisted and from the pained, broken sound the movement brought out, the pain redoubled. “W-What more.. do y-you want?”

He was _panicking_ now. Kuro was panicking, undoubtedly having flashbacks, his whole body shuddering against the straps binding him to the seat and it was a painfully familiar sight.

 _“Allura.”_ Keith swallowed around a dry throat, standing and pushing his chair back so that he could walk closer to them. This had to stop or he had to leave, he couldn’t see this.

It was a reality of war but it was still _wrong,_ and his hands shot out, pressing against Allura’s shoulders as Kuro snarled in the princess’s face looking like he’d very much love to rip out her throat, his fight against his panic giving way to anger. They were losing an ally, here, if Lance was right - and he knew that the instant Lance found out what was happening here he was going to give them both a dressing down of his own.

“Allura you have to stop this!” Taking a firm grip of her wrist, he pulled her hand away from Kuro’s arm and watched as he instantly slumped back against the chair, his body having been autonomously leaning away from the source of the pain as far as he could get around the straps. “This isn’t right, Princess. Hurting him won’t get you the truth, only what he thinks you need to hear to make you stop.”

At his words, Allura looked down at her hand in his grip like it was a foreign object, blinking in confusion. She had clearly let her temper get the better of her but Keith had to admit that he wasn’t so hypocritical as to call her out on that, especially not here and now. If Kuro was going to betray them he wasn’t going to take very long about it, knowing the personality of the paladin he so perfectly mirrored, so all they had to do was let him go and wait.

“Keith..” Her voice was soft, then, almost horrified and completely devoid of the contempt that had been levelled at Kuro. He was panting, shaking, avoiding their eyes as he slumped in the chair. He couldn’t blame her for trying to be pre-emptive but this wasn’t something he could stomach. They were supposed to be the defenders of the universe, not sinking to the Druid’s level with someone who had willingly come to them for sanctuary, Galran or not.

He stopped for just long enough to catch Kuro’s yellow eyes and the layer of total isolation under the front of coldness behind them made Keith feel more than a little sick. As had no doubt been Haggar’s intention he couldn’t look at him without seeing Shiro, the uncanny-valley-like feeling of wrongness sinking deeper into his being the longer their eyes locked. He wasn’t expecting to see gratitude layered beneath the cold, but perhaps Kuro underestimated exactly how well he knew him already just by being in his presence long enough to map all his physical tells back to their origins. Right now he was silently being challenged to speak. To defend his position on not allowing the torture methods that Kuro had clearly expected from the start, or was perhaps used to. That was a stomach churning thought.

 

“You can stay.” Averting his eyes, Keith paused in the doorway listening to the quiet hiss as it rolled backward behind him. “But if you betray us it will be the last thing you ever do.”

“Threats don’t suit you, Keith.” Kuro wasn’t anywhere near as venomous, simply sitting still and watching as Allura undid the bindings keeping him down, but that didn’t mean his words didn’t make something uncomfortable crawl the walls of his skull anyway. “But I’ll gladly accept your terms.”

Just like that, the power dynamic in the room seemed to shift again. Kuro left Allura behind without so much as looking at her as he strode out into the hallway to follow Keith’s rapid progress _\- not an escape, he told himself, he definitely wasn’t almost running, of course not -_ out of there toward the healing pod chamber, and the dismissal was instant and obvious. She looked smaller, suddenly, hovering in the doorway looking more unsure than Kuro ever remembered. As far as he was concerned, that could only be a good thing. No-one else had questioned her decisions for far too long.

"You're running away." Somehow Kuro seemed capable of getting his back up even faster than Lance just by talking, and Keith sped up as soon as he realised he was being followed, ignoring the teasing tone. He couldn't be anywhere near Allura right now, not after that, the knife strapped to his waist seeming to burn against his skin as the sound of her hissing the word 'Galra' at their impromptu guest like it was some kind of grave insult span on a loop in his mind. If that was how she treated Kuro...

"Shut it." he replied, not turning or stopping to acknowledge how much Kuro's words were getting to him. He couldn't be the leader that Shiro was trying to make him if he couldn't stomach this.

"At least _Allura_ understands what has to be done if you want to take this war seriously." The scathing disapproval was back, now directed at him, and it only made Keith move faster. "Haggar was wrong about her."

His steps slowed, cursing the tempting silence hanging between them and the offer he could tell was waiting there. If Kuro had most of Shiro's memories, like he said, then that meant he knew what Shiro was thinking when he'd decided that Keith should take his place. He might be happy to answer all the questions that Shiro so casually dodged or joked away, but he might also lie. Lie to put a rift between the team, to create the kind of secrets that would make forming Voltron hard again. There was no way of knowing what his motivations were.

 

The two of them came to a stop by some large square windows as Keith rounded on his heel and Kuro stopped short, his last few paces echoing down the hallway. It wasn't that short of a distance from the bridge to the healing pods, it couldn't be because they had to be able to check on them while keeping within range of the central battle station on the ship, but it was far enough to give them privacy.

"What does Haggar say about her?" he asked, quietly looking the clone up and down. His resemblance to Shiro was becoming less obvious, now, as the physical differences were starker when he was on his own. Now he was beginning to understand how Lance had come to find some sort of sympathy for him. "How does she even know enough, anyway?"

"She was there when the lions were built. When Allura was born... and surprisingly talkative, if you're careful." Kuro replied carefully, shrugging. More or less every memory associated with the head Druid was difficult, to say the least, but he saw no reason to withhold information. It wasn't like he planned on joining the losing side any time soon and from what he remembered, the losing side was definitely Zarkon's - as soon as this team got it's act together and started being serious, and assuming Voltron was as powerful as Haggar believed. "According to her, your princess was little more than a spoilt child. Always daddy's favourite."

"That isn't the impression any of us get, so far." Keith couldn't picture Allura as anything but the composed, cheerful person they'd seen from when she'd first woken up to now. Of course, that was after waking up and learning that her planet and her race were dead - and in his personal experience, loss changed you. Allura had never had chance to grieve properly, and the cracks were starting to show, at least to the people like him who actually knew what to look for.

"Good. Of course, Haggar's opinion is entirely biased. It's not like once the war started and she picked a side, she'd have spent much time around the royal family to see any changes. War makes people grow up fast."

"How do we know we can trust you?"

"You don't." Kuro shrugged, his stiff posture no doubt from the aftershocks of whatever pain Allura had caused starting to level out again. The fact he could recover that quickly said an uncomfortable amount about how much he was used to the kind of treatment Allura had given him. "Except.. I have no reason to betray the people who are keeping me out of the empire's hands, do I? As I told Lance, it's not like I've never _tried_ to escape."

"If you've really got Shiro's memories," He was probably going to regret this, but much like Lance he couldn't help but _hope._ Kuro hadn't exactly been personable but he was fully aware that his initial reaction hadn't exactly been stellar, either. Neither had Allura's. Perhaps they could change that going forward, "tell me something he knows that no one else does."

"Why do you want to know?"

"Because I need to know how much _you_ know. About us. About Voltron." It wasn't just that, of course, and Keith's voice went quiet as he glared at the floor, feeling his face heat. If Kuro had all of Shiro's memories then there were things he knew, things about _him,_ that he would rather be kept private. Things that only he and Shiro had shared both at the Garrison and here, in space. "About everything we've been through so far."

"'The _'we'_ referring to you and him specifically, you mean?" A sly smirk crossed Kuro's face as he took a step closer, and Keith moved backward for a moment before steeling himself and stilling. He'd asked the question, he could take the answer. He had to be able to. "You want to know if I remember what you two get up to with the lights off?" Keith had gone about as red as his lion at this point, he was sure, and Kuro seemed to find it hilarious. "Let's just say... does the word _anti-gravity_ ring any bells?"

 

Lance woke from the healing pod not feeling as groggy as usual, the soft grey bodysuit much more comfortable to spend an extended period unconscious in than the one that went under his armour.

"Ah, you're awake." Coran's bright voice had an edge of worry to it that he could totally sympathise with, trying to remind himself of everything that had happened in the last twenty four hours as the clear glass in front of the pod slid away and he held onto one side to step gingerly out of it. "Excellent news. You're all fixed up and ready to go."

"Thanks, Coran."

The only place he wanted to go was bed, even though he'd been out cold for the last hour or so. A facemask and his music and a nice nap in his fluffy blue lion pyjamas sounded great right about now.

"Coran, how's he--ah, you're up." Keith strolled into the room at speed and came to a quick stop, folding his arms. Of course, now Lance was awake and in the clear he was going back to his prickly self, he should have expected to see that happen. His expression of open concern when he first walked in somehow took all of the sting out of how short with him Keith had been before this whole mission started.

His attention was taken a few seconds later as Kuro walked in, rubbing the quickly purpling and decidedly fist shaped bruise on his cheek and not looking even the slightest bit repentant for whatever he'd done to cause it.

"Damn, you have a right hook on you when you're pissed." he mumbled absently as he rubbed his face, smirking at the back of Keith's head and going rather pointedly ignored as Keith's attention remained on Lance, who raised an eyebrow at the embarrassed flush on Keith's face as he grimaced. Kuro couldn't have been up to no good _already_ , surely.

"I'd have thought you'd've remembered that." the Red Paladin ground out, avoiding eye contact with any of them and making Kuro chuckle.

"Okay I just woke up, someone's going to have to explain the joke." Lance replied tiredly. Kuro was still a bit of a rogue element to this whole situation but he was happy to see that after how unhappy Keith had been initially it seemed they'd been able to at least level with each other without there being any need for weapons involved.

"Oh, it's nothing. Just Keith-"

"-don't you _dare-"_

"-asking me if I remember-"

_"-I'm warning you-"_

"-how much kinky fun he's been getting up to with your fearless leader. Pre and post Garrison."

"Alright, _that's it."_ Coran came to a stop next to Lance as the two of them watched Keith chase Kuro around the pods, his hand hovering over the knife attached to his belt making it look like he was seriously considering stabbing him instead of just giving him a black eye to match the bruise on the other side of his face.

 

It didn't surprise him to have his suspicions about Shiro and Keith confirmed as much as it hurt having to consider the reality that every time he caught himself using Shiro as some kind of escapist fantasy, it was going to leave him feeling worse than he had before. It was fine if Shiro was a free agent, but friends weren't home-wreckers and they didn't lust after their friend's man so there was probably a hell of a lot of guilt in his near future. On this like so many other things he was going to have to concede defeat to the idea that Keith was better than him, and it stung. No matter how much he knew Keith needed - hell, _deserved_ \- at least this one good thing after a life of isolation from all the other people he cared about, it still hurt.

It was definitely time to sleep. Maybe if he slept enough he could miss this whole stupid fight with the Galra and just wake up back at home.

“Well, while you two chase each other around the castle, I’m going to go and get some real sleep.” Waving them off, he turned away from their ongoing game of chase.

“Seriously? You just spent however long in a healing pod, you can’t be tired.” Keith paused long enough for Kuro to put enough of a distance between them that it wasn’t really worth chasing him anymore, as he’d be out of the door and gone before the Red Paladin ever managed to catch him. He wasn’t expecting to take to any of them so quickly, but he supposed it wasn’t as if they were all strangers - at least not in the same way that he was to them. In a weird way, being on the castle ship was like coming home. At the very least it instinctually flooded him with feelings of safety in a way the Galran ship he’d been born on, his actual home for all intents and purposes, never had done.

“Being mentally and physically tired are two whole different ballgames, buddy.” Lance replied, turning to grin at them with a carefree smile that made it nowhere near all the way up to his eyes. “These pods are a modern miracle but they only heal the second kind.”

Keith shrugged and glanced away, but Kuro did not, standing and watching the saddened look that came bubbling back to the surface as soon as Keith’s eyes were gone, Lance’s eyes dropping to the floor as he span on his heel and concealed his face from them altogether. Seeing the movement made Kuro frown, feeling an odd kind of unity with the Blue Paladin not for the first time.

Whether Lance was aware of it or not, Haggar had made sure they had an awful lot of shared experiences and he could entirely empathise with Lance’s exhaustion. That was an odd thought when he’d spent every day of his life up till now actively choking off soft human emotions like mercy and the desire to take another’s pain for them if he could. And yet… he’d seen that expression before, the defeated peace that had crossed Lance’s face when he realised that making the conscious choice not to harm his opponent because it was the right thing to do meant that he was going to die. Lance wasn’t at all as settled as he was very effectively pretending to be. He was giving something up, in silence and alone, and it _hurt._

There was also yet again nothing Kuro could do for him.

“You’ve got more than enough time to sleep if you want, Lance. We’re still in transit.” He replied, a quiet sigh leaving him as he glanced at the large window across the hallway.

“Hunk’s been baking, though. It’d probably be an idea to go stick your head in the kitchen at least.” Keith added, shrugging.

“That does sound like him.” Lance’s smile was a little bit more genuine this time but only just, nevertheless a massive improvement on the look that had been on his face a moment ago. “Alright.”

 

* * *

 

Not all of the rooms on the same corridor as the Paladins were taken, which meant that Kuro was easily able to make himself at home in one of them. The fact that it was almost directly across the hallway from Lance’s, a small blue applique of a lion marking it out from the other’s doors, was a fact that he made a conscious choice to ignore. He might have actively tried to kill Lance the first time they met but right now he was the only person on the ship that he felt like he knew well enough to be comfortable with. The others didn’t trust him and Lance did - enough to bring him along at least.

 

It was a fairly simple room, the bed closed in at the ends by storage with a small en-suite bathroom. The only thing that was unsettling was the large rectangular mirrored panels on the wall opposite the bed, affixed above a long row of drawers that he supposed were to store the clothes he didn’t own. A desk was slotted in one corner away from the door, so at least he had somewhere to sit and review documents if he needed it. The communal recreation areas, clearly marked by the telescreens and squashy sofas, were much like lots of the other spaces on the ship. Wide open chasms with no cover and almost a one-way system of doorways that weren’t that tactically advantageous to defend by hand. Namely, impossible to focus or relax in for someone like him.

It was clear that if the ship really was initially intended to serve as a castle it didn’t meet the human design specification that the word suggested. Maybe Alteans had a different understanding of what a castle was for. Maybe they relieved on their technology too much - the Galra certainly did.

He stared at his reflection and tried not to think about the fact that the last time he’d seen it, the disgust at the similarities between himself and Shiro were still fresh. He’d still been desperate to see any kind of difference in the exterior of himself to match what he felt inside and the Druids had found him decorated in several bloody new scars from his own claws before they managed to stop him and tell him what was going on. That he was rejecting himself, trying to rebuild himself differently and get away from the personality of everything that made Shiro the person he was. Warring to make someone new.

That had certainly worked, at least, one of his few successes despite Haggar’s attempt to guide and derail him.

The silence in the room pitched the ship’s engines to a dull roar that made it hard to think, and although the escape from the prison ship had been taxing, he was used to exhaustion. He didn’t usually rest so much as collapse and there was no way he could sleep like this. A data-pad of recent maintenance logs and some headphones helped to drown it all out, though, and according to the day/night cycle simulation of the ship’s interior lighting it was easily early morning before he looked up from the task of getting back up to speed with the memories that he didn’t have.

 

The emergency lights in the hallway were only just enough light to see by, ordinarily, but that wasn’t a problem for him. The Galran DNA that Haggar had mixed into him to prevent his body from rejecting the upgraded technology in his prosthetic came with other perks, like the ability to see in the dark and generally better hearing. He was just thankful he hadn’t sprouted fluffy ears and a tail, there wasn’t much subtlety to be found when you had swivelling dish-like ears giving away your every passing emotion.

He didn’t miss the second set of footsteps approaching from the other end of the corridor, but couldn’t help his curiosity when he saw who it was. Shiro was distracted, still a little pale but clearly trying to give himself something else to think about as his eyes scanned the doorways and displays that passed by for any sign that something was wrong.

“What are you expecting to find? It’s just an empty hallway.” The sound of his voice startled his mirror image, and he tensed as Shiro’s face was cast in a soft purple glow, his prosthetic activating in response to his shock and raised guard. When he saw who it was, the light dimmed again, but he didn’t step any closer.

Instead it was Kuro who closed the gap, coming to a stop opposite him. It was an odd moment, seeing a face so familiar, a face he’d watched wear expressions of shock and agony so often as he tore through the failed clones that Haggar set him against as training. All training for this - the real thing, and now that they had finally met no fight was forthcoming.

“Hello.” Shiro’s expression was schooled as close to neutrality as it could get given his probable inner turmoil.

“Hello.” Kuro echoed, tilting his head and shifting the centre of weight in his stance a little as he watched Shiro complete the same motion. “Still patrolling the castle at night, huh?”

“Still?” Shiro raised an eyebrow and it was only then that he realised that Keith must have not exactly been forthcoming with what he’d learnt.. Or maybe just didn’t know how to broach the topic when the first time they had met each other, Shiro had reacted by having a rather understandable panic attack given how he must have been reminded of everything Haggar had ever done to him when he thought he was starting to move past it. “What exactly.. What happened to you?”

 

The words brought Kuro up short. It wasn’t a disgusted ‘what are you?’, or a scathing ‘what is that supposed to mean?’… just a concerned ‘what happened?’. Shiro was actively concerned for what he’d been through now that he was done panicking and it starkly reminded him of Lance. Everything in this damn castle was pointing his thoughts toward the Blue Paladin at the moment it seemed.

“When they captured you, Haggar cloned your DNA.” Sighing, Kuro broke his deliberate mimicking to lean heavily against the wall of the hallway, vaguely feeling the heat from the low-level lighting in the floor as he stared off into the middle distance and tried to carefully pick through his memories, arms crossing. “So they could keep pretending ‘The Champion’ was alive in the arena.”

“And that’s you?”

“One of. Pretty sure they made me kill the rest. You fought Haggar not too long ago, didn’t you?”

One of Shiro’s hands curled reflexively against his side, a remembered wound, and Kuro sighed.

“Yes.”

“She stole some of your quintessence and gave it to the strongest clone…so.. _surprise_ , I guess?” a half hearted attempt at jazz hands followed and he watched as Shiro’s eyes fell to the sharp claws that extended from his prosthetic, rending empty air. “I know you never really settled after Sendak invaded the castle. He nearly stole the lions. He nearly killed Lance. They slipped through despite you trying to keep watch on the door and it still bothers you.”

“It was a fight we almost didn’t win.” Shiro replied, nodding. “I won’t let it happen again. Ever.”

“I remember… but like I said. It’s just an empty hallway. We’re in transit in deep space, no ships dangerously close, you know because you checked. You always check. So why are you wasting your energy patrolling empty hallways?”

“I couldn’t sleep, that’s all.” He didn’t believe the tired response for a minute but knowing himself meant he knew it was pointless to try and argue around Shiro’s veneer of perfect leadership. It wouldn’t get through. “Being useful is better than lying in bed trying to go back to sleep and failing.”

“Alright.” Maybe it was time to try a different angle. Shiro thankfully didn’t seem to want to play twenty questions over the specifics of everything now he’d made a distraction attempt, and he was happy for that at least. “But if you’re not at peak performance because you’re not sleeping, everyone else are the ones who suffer. They depend on you far too much.”

“They’ll get better, Keith’s already—”

 _“—No, he isn’t._ He isn’t ready for any of this and if you think he’d be able to jump in your grave straight after losing you..” It wasn’t a very nice way to word this but he had to do it. Keith had seen Allura doing what was necessary for a leader and all he’d wanted to do was run away from it, Kuro had seen that much in his face. He wasn’t ready to take up Shiro’s role - although that didn’t necessarily mean he never would be. “..look, I get it, you want them to have a smooth transition if one has to happen, but have you even considered anyone else rather than the one person who would certainly be too busy grieving for you? Lance, maybe?”

“Lance? Why?” The confusion on Shiro’s face said it all. He hadn’t thought about anyone else, hadn’t weighed and measured his team-mates in his head for the best option. Just defaulted straight to Keith because he knew him and could form a good mental picture of what his strengths and limits were. “He’s a little.. immature, at times. I’m sure he could, I’m sure any of them could. He’s just far less ready than Keith is.”

“Really? Because that wasn’t what I saw when he faced me in the arena.” Lance’s face, and the pained acceptance as he realised that he would never jeopardise another team-member’s feelings for his own perceived selfishness, swam to the forefront of Kuro’s mind and made him scowl. Lance deserved to at least be considered for his additions to the team, even if Shiro would never recognise him in the other ways he wanted.

 

“This isn’t what I thought you would be like.” Although he could admit that his mind liked to jump to the worst conclusion first, especially where the Galra were concerned, Shiro genuinely hadn’t expected his clone to already be this invested in the team and their issues. He’d expected him to be antagonistic, to waste their time or attack them and try to steal a lion or sabotage the castle, but so far none of those things had happened even when he was left alone. When he thought about the person he might have become if what they suspected had been Kuro’s entire life up till now was true he didn’t think he would have been able to keep it together like this. “I.. I guess I thought—”

“—You thought that I’d be more like _you._ Didn’t you?” Shiro fell silent as he was interrupted again, mouth pressing into a thin line as he watched Kuro’s claws go from being sarcastically wiggled at him to absentmindedly clawing at four deep scars that made thin scratch-like lines down his neck and disappeared under the black and purple fabric of the Galran prisoner-wear that he still hadn’t taken off. His stomach gave a sickening lurch when he realised that the claw marks were exactly the right shape and angle to have been put there with the same light motion Kuro was already making to aggravate them. Using pain as a distraction, _just like him._ “Well.. Sorry to disappoint but that ship’s been and gone.”

“I guess that’s.. good. It seems like you were able to adjust a lot better than I would have, I’ll hold my hands up and admit to that.” Kuro deserved at least that much honesty from him given it was his fault that the clone had been put through everything he’d experienced so far. He didn’t know why Haggar would chose to clone him, surely she couldn’t have been that attached to him given what little he remembered of his initial year in space, but now that she had it wasn’t something he could take back. He certainly wasn’t going to hurt Kuro just because of the circumstances of his creation, it didn’t seem like he actively wanted any part in what had gone on around him to make him what he was.

 

“Didn’t have a choice.” Kuro replied flatly. “It was train to replace you, or die trying. Although.. I think I made a better Champion than I remember you being, at least by Galran standards.” He couldn’t help but smirk a little even if most of the arena-related memories that he had were painful. He hadn’t been in Shiro’s position, fighting for his life against consecutively stronger enemies. He had been the big fish in that pond, and it got boring fast. He was pretty sure Haggar had made sure it did because the unceasing monotony of his wake up-kill things-pass out routine eventually became just another form of torture to wear his mind down and keep him quiet with.

“Not sure that’s a good thing.”

“No, probably not.” There seemed to be a natural lull in the conversation and he knew an opportunity to escape when he saw it. Shiro might start asking him questions again that neither of them really wanted to hear him answer. “Go to sleep.”

He got several quick steps away, still not entirely comfortable with the idea of having anyone on this ship behind him and out of his sight for long enough to decide they weren’t going to wait for him to show whatever true colours they suspected that he had before attacking him first. It had only taken Allura an hour, maybe less than that, and if she was supposed to be the one with a modicum of composure it didn’t look good for the rest of them.

“Letting you stay here doesn’t mean we trust you.” The words stung but they were no more or less than Kuro already expected to hear, pausing and glancing over his shoulder. Shiro’s voice was firm and cold - thoroughly that of a leader who expected to be followed, not someone suggesting a course of action to a teammate like he did every other time he spoke to one of them. “I know you’ve already been in Blue once, but I think it’s probably best if you stay away from the hangars. Allura has enough on her mind.”

“You don’t trust me? Well.. Good.” He couldn’t help the smirk that he’d worn while imitating Shiro to fuck with him resurfacing at this, the sudden coldness after it felt like they might have had a glimmer of shared understanding. “I wouldn’t trust me, either. I might not even have been the only person Haggar cloned. She’s probably going for the full set.”

_“What?”_

 

The shocked hiss was rewarding but somewhat tainted by the memory of watching two Druids arrange Lance’s unconscious body like they were preparing a corpse for a funeral before they put him in the tube and he was kicked out of the room, excluded from knowing what happened to Lance next. Even if they had managed to make another clone, the entire lab had gone up in flames more or less the instant the Lions started to attack the ship. There was no way anything could have gotten out in time, so it felt safe to tease, and the smirk on his face only widened as he gave a casual wave over his shoulder and strode off in the general direction of the kitchens given his stomach was angrily complaining at missing dinner.

“Goodnight, Shiro.”

 

* * *

 

 

The next day was mostly devoted to maintenance. It was true that the castle hadn’t taken any severe hits for a short while but with such a small team on board compared to the actual crew capacity and the sheer amount of engineers and technological specialists it would have taken that they just didn’t have, castle-wide daily repairs were out of the question. While the paladins donned their armour and set about fixing up problem spots on the exterior of the ship that couldn’t be reached by drone, Kuro found himself following Coran around to help out where he could. The alternative was staying on the bridge with Allura as everyone else got to work and even with all the patience in the world there was no way he was subjecting himself to that.

The altean adviser was a kind person, although no less steely for it, and from the very few brief snatches of time he’d managed to spend with Lance and Coran both in a room at the same point it seemed like he was one of the few people on the ship (apart from himself) who actually noticed all the work that Lance put in behind the scenes. That automatically bumped him higher on Kuro’s list of good people in and of itself.

“Are you sure there’s nothing else you want me to do right now?”

 

Coran had handed him a small drone remote, the circular robot hovering outside the large, panoramic window on one of the decks just below the bridge. He was essentially cleaning and repairing the exterior of the castle with it, thankfully without having to go outside. Unlike the paladins he didn’t have a dedicated space suit although upon noticing it, Coran had already mentioned about needing more specifications in order to make him one. There was no point him being stuck on the ship if he wanted to be useful, after all, and he’d wholeheartedly accepted that as a reason to ignore the ugly thoughts that surfaced at the idea of the altean wanting to do anything just for him. If he’d managed to convince Lance that he was worth bringing along in the first place then he had to start at least trying to ignore the urge to second guess his place on the ship.

All his experiences so far directly countered what Haggar had told him would happen. Outside of Allura quite obviously losing her temper and acting in a way she normally wouldn’t, no-one had tried to kill him. Keith had punched him, sure, but he’d deliberately agitated him enough for that at the time. Pidge, Hunk and Lance seemed to have welcomed him with as close to open arms as he suspected that he was going to get and Shiro.. well, the fact that he was avoiding him since their short chat in the hallway wasn’t something that bothered him all that much. He’d spent enough time comparing himself to Shiro without even knowing him that he was happy to leave his de-facto progenitor to do the same on his own time as long as he wasn’t outwardly rude about it. The ship was big enough for the two of them to avoid each other if they wanted.

None of it countered the idea that he’d spent months being told that his only purposes in life were to kill the paladins and take the Black Lion from them, though. None of it stopped the nightmares. Now that he’d met them and was beginning to memorise their habits and get familiar with the sounds of their voices and what echoed when they walked, he could sneak up on them. He _could_ kill them, if he wanted, and every fibre of the instinct still thoroughly ruled by Haggar’s end goals screamed at him for every opportunity that he missed. For every time he could hurt them and didn’t. Fighting his own brain had been tiring enough when he was trying to sort out just who he was on his own terms, now he was having to fight himself to break back out of the mental programming he’d talked himself into and it was just as exhausting as the physical training he spent the best part of every day still doing in an effort to ride out the waves of intrusive thoughts.

“No, it’s fine. Just fix up what you can - you still remember where everything is, am I right?” Coran’s voice was getting fainter down the corridor as he pulled himself from his thoughts, deliberately looking anywhere but his reflection in the window so that he could smile at the man now looking back over his shoulder to watch him.

“Yeah. I’ve been reading the ship’s logs. Better to come and see everything for myself than rely on what Shiro took away from being shown around the first time, you look like you could use the extra pair of hands to keep up with everything. It’s not like the place just fixes itself.”

Apparently his response was the right one, as a small smile crossed Coran’s face. He wasn’t expecting the hesitant look of fondness he saw there, though, the same expression the adviser so often regarded Lance with beginning to form but currently tampered down by the newness and anxiety of not knowing each other for all that long a time yet.

“About time _someone_ noticed, I suppose.” He replied, tweaking his considerable moustache. “This place doesn’t fix itself, indeed not. Well… I’ll let you get to it. I’ll be on the bridge if you need assistance.”

“See you later, Coran.”

 

It wasn’t until he managed to get his drone around the whole other side of the castle, fixing up broken shielding units and atmospheric entry heat-resistance panelling as he went, that he accidentally got close enough to the other paladins to pick their conversation up over the open communication channel between the five of them and the ship, the ship’s computer feeding the audio back into the headset he’d purloined to keep in the loop with the rest of the castle’s communications array. The paladins had them in their helmets, but that was something else he was without for the moment.

“It’s _beautiful.”_ Pidge’s worshipful-sounding voice came through as he glimpsed them clustered together close to the engines, and he could only guess she was talking about the actual ship itself, given that if you gave her the chance she was happy to talk about the elegance of altean design as long as she wasn’t complaining that not knowing the altean language made trying to reverse engineer anything onboard a decidedly long-standing thorn in her side.

“It’s not a sunset, Pidge.” Kuro chuckled at Lance’s dry tone, diverting his attention back to the readings that the small drone was taking from the panelling it was scanning for damage. 42% structural integrity meant they were going to have to do some repairs or replacements to the panels before too long or they wouldn’t be able to make planetfall anywhere with an atmosphere unless they wanted to damage the thrusters on this side of the ship, and…

“Ugh, what the?!” Hunk’s exclamation made Kuro look up sharply again, frowning a little as he started to notice a cloud of small white clumps begin filtering past his window - and more importantly, the team outside. Whatever they were he hoped they weren’t radioactive. Or some kind of weapon.

“Alright, we’re prepared for this. Remember your rogue projectile cluster training from the Garrison.” Shiro’s calm voice accompanied a cautiously raised shield, from what he could see, and a few seconds later Keith followed his lead. Kuro watched as Lance casually snatched up one of the floating balls as it went past him, taking a moment to aim. He missed, obviously miscalculating, and went for another, Shiro and Keith remaining none the wiser. “First we need a temporary shelter.” This time, Lance’s redirected _‘rogue projectile’_ bounced off the back of Shiro with surprising aplomb, causing him to splutter and Kuro to snicker, abandoning what he was doing to lean against the window and keep watching.

“Oh, sorry, Shiro. I was trying to hit Keith.” Lance replied, clearly trying to backtrack only to be nailed straight in the face by another one of the mysterious balls and growl in annoyance.

“Heh.” Keith was the culprit that time, smirking at Lance so widely that Kuro could see it from a distance with a playful look on his face that he found himself set oddly on edge by. “Like _that?”_

An unpleasant sense of heat prickled in Kuro’s gut at that tone. He knew what it sounded like when Keith was flirting - namely exactly like that, yes - and he didn’t expect to see it in this context, telling himself it was firmly the context that was bothering him and not who it was aimed at. Keith might not even be aware of what he was doing, really… but it didn’t sit right at all.

“Yes!” Hunk barrelled in between them then, a ball-shaped object in each hand, and the strange moment of tension smoothed away again like it had never existed as he watched the others arm themselves too. _“Squishy asteroid fight!”_

 

Rolling his eyes, Kuro turned away from them and decided to check the panels on the other side of the ship. If they were as badly damaged as the ones on this side, letting Coran know was more important than watching the slackers outside pelt each other with squishy asteroids.

 

* * *

 

With Pidge and Hunk busy marvelling over the construction of the distress-beacon spores, and Shiro and Keith he would rather not guess where doing things he would also rather not think about in too much detail, there wasn’t much for Lance to do. It didn’t help either that the chance to shut off his brain with some heavy exercise was long lost. The training room was already occupied… just not in the way that he had expected when he entered it.

When he first met Kuro in the arena he had thought that once they got safely away from Haggar and the arena life, the clone would begin to actively avoid combat simulations at first, just like Shiro had. That expectation didn’t at all line up with the reality that was actively unravelling in from of him. Kuro was fighting three of the castle’s gladiator droids at once, and the look of deep focus on his face wasn’t something that Lance wanted to break by announcing his presence. For one he’d probably make Kuro stall and ultimately get hit by one of them and he was all too familiar with that pain. Allura was the best friend and leader he could ask for but when it came to training drills she was a stranger to the concept of taking it easy on them. Shiro wasn’t much better, either, and he could already see that Kuro shared his work ethic even if he seemed to have rejected most of the other parts of what made Shiro himself.

Moving as quietly as he could Lance moved just to one side of the doorway and settled down to watch, resting his back against the floor and crossing his legs under him to slide down into a comfortable seated position he could still roll out of if he ended up at risk of a projectile. It seemed that Kuro had figured out how to program the training AI for different weapons, and it made Lance’s stomach give an unwelcome churn as he realised why there had been chunks of robotics in the gore soup drained from the arena. This was what Kuro was used to, he’d come in here because he’d spent so long having to fight every day that without it, he didn’t know what to do with himself. He had no direction.

 

The droids were a mixture, one charging him with a sword while another hung back providing rifle-created cover fire, a third circling around the back of the clone. It didn’t take him more than a few seconds after realising that the droid’s forearm was glowing with oppressive heat exactly what he was simulating. Exactly what Haggar had been training him to do. He was already scarily prepared for an open fight with them, if this was any indication, he’d already made himself familiar enough with the rate at which Lance could aim and fire in order to keep himself just out of the way of the rifle-bearing droid’s shots while he kept fighting the other two. It was like he’d spent so much time fighting them he was pre-empting every sword swing, knew just when to step out of the way, or to divert his attention from Keith’s replacement droid to Shiro’s. That wasn’t to say that it wasn’t taxing, though, Kuro looked like he was doing his fair share of exertion to say he made it look so easy.

Even when he tried to sit and compare their fighting styles, Kuro was different. Shiro was fluid but rather active in combat, moving and dodging and putting himself in harms way to take the brunt of enemies in place of other team members. Kuro watched and waited, retaining the fluidity of movement that Shiro had but using it to outlast and calculate so that when he did finally target something the result was devastating. It was exactly what he’d done with Lance. He’d watched him come out of the arena gate first back on the ship and instead of rushing out to meet his challenge, he’d hung back. Calculated that Lance was used to hanging back and taking tactical shots and that he wouldn’t be able to withstand the kind of brutal force that he’d put behind that initial body check that had left a massive dent in his armour.

Spinning on his heel, Lance heard the low whine as Kuro’s arm bled light in a steady trickle outward that became a fierce glow. He launched himself at the droid with the sword and plunged his hand straight through it’s chest, straight through the part of the cavity where Keith’s heart would have been and out of the other side. The droid twitched and then disappeared, and Lance stared, remembering the way Kuro had so casually offered to take his heart out for him. The threat seemed much more real now, having sat and watched him do it to a droid without so much as blinking.

He turned, outstretched hand going from through a chest to sweep diagonally upward across the other melee-range droid’s chest, leaving a gaping burn up the centre of it before it fizzled out too. The only one that remained then was the droid he’d set up to replace Lance, and when he turned on it, a voice interrupted him.

 

“End simulation.” Kuro blinked, looking up in the direction the voice had come from to find the real one watching him with an expression clouded by something like doubt. The droid stopped and faded away and Kuro sat down, panting a little with the exertion. Lance had intended not to interrupt but when he realised what he was about to watch, he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t reconcile the way they’d found each other and the small but precious amount of safety he’d felt as Kuro carried him down from Blue into the hangar with watching him tear through a combat droid that he’d specifically designed to substitute for him with no emotion. Catching Kuro’s eye, he realised that his moment of dissatisfaction was showing on his face and schooled his expression into a carefree smile that from the way Kuro frowned he probably didn’t fall for in the slightest. “Why are you here exhausting yourself when we should all be relaxing?”

“This is what I do to relax, Lance.” Kuro replied evenly, picking himself up from the floor and ignoring the quiet splutter of indignance that came from the Blue Paladin. It wasn’t his problem if Lance didn’t see physical exhaustion as a necessity in the quest to finally sleep.

“Yeah, no. We’ll find something else than stressing yourself out here on your own.”

Resting one hand on the wall, Lance uncrossed his legs and pushed himself to his feet, regarding Kuro with an expression that suggested not only was he unimpressed he was also intending to do something about it right now. Indeed, he crossed the room and took Kuro by the wrist, dragging him out. He’d had to do this with Keith before and he’d damn well do it again and be fine… as long as he didn’t think about the fact that Kuro was silently following him when if he wanted, he could have just given Lance’s grip on his wrist a tug and bodily pulled him instead.

 

It was only after a few moments when he took in the low lights of the corridor, the ship’s day-night cycle system suggesting that while he’d been training late afternoon had somehow turned to late night, that he realised how long it had been. Lance had apparently been happy to just spend all that time watching him, and when he was concentrating he tended to forget how long he could spend going through simple droid fighter programs one after the other.

“You didn’t have to spend all that time watching me, you know. You could be relaxing yourself.” He pointed out, sitting down on the end of his bed heavily before deciding to hit the shower. It wasn’t like Lance couldn’t leave if he wanted to go somewhere else in the meantime, he knew where the door was. “I’m going to get cleaned up.”

“Well, yeah, you did spend a long time working out..” Lance mumbled, watching him pull a soft grey towel from a drawer and then disappear into his en-suite bathroom before occupying Kuro’s previous position to look around. It was like he’d only moved in yesterday even though it had been a few days since the clone first joined them, the room looked barely touched, the only thing disturbed being the bed.

There was a mirror on the wall, but there was _nothing_ personal here. No knickknacks or favourite items he’d formed an attachment to that he could get the castle to replicate. No clothes, even, as Kuro seemed perfectly happy to just keep a stock of generic, castle-created flight suits in varying shades of black that looked roughly similar to Allura’s apart from the colour. If Kuro picked up sticks and stopped using this room tomorrow it wouldn’t make a slight bit of difference to the look of the place and that idea boggled Lance’s mind. He had to fix this.

 

The light in the room was dim to match the castle’s best estimation of night time, a single bar-shaped light above the mirror glowing softly and the main cone-like fitting in the ceiling turned off, and the light gave Lance an idea. The sound of faint low humming came from the shower and he stood up, smoothing down the disturbed black fabric of the duvet. Everything in here was so utilitarian and _boring._ He was sure that Kuro wouldn’t mind if he brightened the place up a bit and planning it all out would make it much easier for him to avoid thinking about what was going on over on the other side of the bathroom door. While he was a rather equal opportunity lover something about the thought of hot guys dripping wet always did him in and if his thoughts strayed anywhere near the finer details of Kuro in particular, he was going to have problems stringing a sentence together. Not to mention he’d just decided to sit and watch Kuro spar like a total creeper without even announcing himself, which wasn’t great either. He was right when he’d said there were other things that Lance could be doing.

He wasn’t even sure why he’d stayed. He had been planning just to see who was in the training room but the fact that it was Kuro had somehow made him stop, his attention caught by the precision and ease that the clone was capable of despite his considerable build. There was the germ of an idea forming slyly in the back of Lance’s mind as to exactly why he’d been so quickly distracted, but hopefully ignoring it would make it wilt.

 

Kuro re-entered the bedroom in soft black pyjamas with his head half-covered by the grey towel to find Lance knelt on his pillows, one hand propping himself up against the wall as he criss-crossed a string of soft gold fairy lights between the two vertically bar-shaped light fittings above his bed. A metal photo frame had appeared on his desk, apparently connected to the ship’s computer, that flicked to a new photo every so often of some half-familiar planet landscape or occasionally a selfie of Lance who was clearly the person responsible for the impromptu travel-brochure-in-photos. On either side of it were a few smoothly cut precious stones in an upturned shell and then another small collection of what looked like a cowrie shell’s smaller and more brightly coloured cousins in varying shades of blue and grey, occasionally spotted with reds and burnt oranges. It was certainly beautiful and looked a lot better than the empty shelving but the items looked more like they belonged in Lance’s room than his.

Knowing Lance’s back was to him, he allowed himself a small smile as he watched the brunet wobble and make a sound of annoyance which rapidly became a sigh of relief as he got the small circular bulbs arranged at equal spaces along the black cord to sit against the wall the way that he wanted, not hanging too low that they’d disrupt actual use of the bed, but not too short that the cord looked too tense and stiff.

“Uh, Lance? What’s all this for?”

The relief that had been all over Lance’s posture moments before was rapidly replaced by shock as his hand left the wall, destabilising his balance on the pillows and tipping him sideways. Kuro found himself moving without really thinking about it, stepping forward to catch Lance before he hit the floor. He saw Lance’s face practically glow in the dark at the contact and seconds later he wiggled out of the hold and stood by the bed, folding his arms.

“Just thought the place could do with brightening up a little… just something low key.” Lance replied quietly, glancing at the floor. “You don’t like it?”

“No.. I do… I just.. Don’t have anything like this.” He just wanted to see Lance relax again, noting the tension in his shoulders and the way he refused to look up like he was expecting some kind of harshness in response to his act of kindness. It probably didn’t even occur to him that Kuro had never had anyone do anything like this for him before. No one else thought he was worth the time and it just hadn’t occurred to him that he _could_ start to personalise his space. It wasn’t like you could do much customisation or attempt to bring any home comfort to a prison cell and that was all he’d known so far. “Thank you, Lance. Really.”

 

It seemed to mollify him a little but he still refused to risk looking up and catching Kuro’s eye, diverting instead to grabbing the small packet on the bedside table. The little plastic stars contained inside were already glowing slightly because of the darkness in the room, and the sight of them tugged at his heart. Shiro’s ceiling had been covered in these as he was growing up, as he went through childhood to adolescence with eyes and heart both firmly set on the stars of the real world, stars he was determined to explore for himself, and Kuro could remember how much work it had taken to make sure that the constellations of Earth’s night sky were traced across the ceiling.

“Figured since you don’t have any other souvenirs yet, you could make your own star map.” Lance offered, finally glancing sideways at him. His face was almost glowing red almost enough to rival the soft yellowish-green of the packet of stars in his hand, and the sight made Kuro’s face heat up, too, not really knowing how to react. “You can maybe add constellations you like from the places we visit, lots of races are happy to explain their systems of astrology to us if one of us asks.”

Climbing onto Kuro’s bed again, he leant backward to begin the process of sticking the stars to the ceiling in small clusters, making two that he thought he could recognise directly above his pillows so that they’d be the last thing he saw as he went to sleep if he looked up at the ceiling. One way unmistakably the sickle-curve of the brightest stars in Ursa Major, one singular star added a little way away from the Big Dipper to signify Polaris. The guidance of the North Star was something that had served as a motivation for explorers through a lot of human history and he wasn’t surprised Lance had latched onto it, too. The second constellation was a lot less familiar, two unequal triangles laid vertically on top of each other, the top one smaller than the bottom to form a rough approximation of a person. Two stars were clustered close to it on either side, one pair slightly higher than the other with smaller clusters of two or three stars above the arm-like offshoots, and it took a moment to place it before his heart twisted in his chest.

 

Without a doubt the planet that Shiro had the fondest memories of so far was Arus. It was the first time he’d had chance to take a breath and feel safe after he got out of his time with the Galra, and after running away from the humans who had responded to his stress by sedating and trying to imprison him. It had still looked and felt close enough to Earth to be comfortable with and the local race had taken to them rather well. When the team decided that it was time for the castle that their planet had been host to for 10,000 years to leave, the Arusians had pointed out this almost hour-glass shaped constellation and said that it would protect them on their outward journey. _The Lion Goddess._

His throat tightened at the sight, and he smiled, willing the strange warmth coiling in his chest away. There was no point getting attached, there never was. The moment he got attached to something the Druids took it away from him in whatever way they could. That was perhaps why he had been studiously avoiding thinking about the Lions, especially after how his interactions so far with Allura had gone. Sinking heavily onto the bed and making himself comfortable, he watched as Lance walked over to the panel by the door and flicked most of the lights off, leaving the room lit by the fairy lights strung above his bed and the two small constellations. They were already strongly associated to memories that Shiro shared with Lance, but the significant stretch of darkness around them was all his. The ceiling had gone from bare bulbs to the potential for adventures and memories that were entirely his own to collate and record, and he didn’t think Lance had any idea what being able to think about it like that meant. The Blue Paladin had probably just thought it would look cool.

Either way there wasn’t any way he was going to find it easy to sleep now. There was one thing he didn’t get.

“Why would you do this for me?”

“Well, why not? You don’t seem to have any knack for making the place feel lived in.” Lance replied, shrugging and moving to get up off the bed that he’d wandered back towards and sat down on again. “I should probably let you sleep, huh? You were training for a long time, you must be tired.”

 

He was deliberately redirecting away from himself again, that much Kuro could tell he had experience with. After the discussion he’d had with Coran earlier and piecing together in more detail everything he already knew, he didn’t have to make any great leap of logic to guess that Lance needed the support just as much as he did right now. He certainly wasn’t getting it from his team, rather he was the one doing all the middle-man social legwork for them and it sounded exhausting. Shiro certainly hadn’t noticed it was happening given how out-of-hand his dismissal of Lance’s leadership potential was and he was the one person who _should_ be looking out for a flagging team member. Knowing that he wasn’t going to put more pressure on Lance if he could help it. He wasn’t going to be just another person to pick up after who took the strain of all the emotional labour that Lance did for granted.

“Can’t sleep unless I’m exhausted.” He reminded him, tilting his head and sighing in satisfaction as his neck vertebrae cracked loudly. It made Lance wince, but he couldn’t help it. “So I don’t think there’s any risk I’ll be sleeping yet.”

“First of all stop doing that, it’s bad for your joints.” Lance replied, gingerly whacking his left shoulder. “If you can’t sleep how about reading? Coran showed me where all the castle’s logs are stored and I managed to get a few of the ebooks I had onto the system.”

“You read for fun?” He didn’t mean it to come out as incredulous as his tone ended up, the image of Lance curling up with some thick work of fiction something he was more likely to ascribe to Pidge, but thankfully he didn’t look that insulted, grinning and pulling a small square pad out of his jacket pocket that activated to project a rectangular blue screen that he quickly realised was a page.

“Well, yeah. Had to find some way to have alone time with my massive family.” No-one really disturbed him when he was reading and it had been one of the best ways to settle his nerves before an important test or simulator run at the Garrison. He’d had less and less time for it out here in space, though, and had only got a few chapters into the book he had loaded at the moment before he had to stop - in this case Alice in Wonderland. He’d managed to finish it once between first leaving Earth and now and it always made him wonder if he’d known where the rabbit hole (or in this case, wormhole) he’d flown Blue down went, whether he’d actually have done it or if he’d have turned tail and headed straight home. “Wanna listen?”

“Yes, actually.” The sound of Lance’s voice might be just what he needed to chase away the hum of the engine noise while offering the safety of another person being in his proximity, and if he was very lucky the two factors might keep his myriad of recurring nightmares at bay long enough for him to get at least five hours of sleep. He could hope, anyway. “That would be nice.”

 

It was only when Lance reached the natural endpoint of a chapter, soft lilting voice falling into silence against the hum of the castles engines moving them toward Olkarion at full pace, that he noticed Kuro was practically asleep. His stress induced paleness had been soothed away a little, or at least wasn't as noticeable in the soft gold glow of the fairy lights.

"Why did you bring me here, Lance? I don't fit." Kuro's words were a soft, tired mumble but they tore at his heart all the same.

"Of course you do. You're no less capable or worthy than any of us and I couldn't just leave you there like that." he replied, a small frown deepening on his already troubled face as he watched tension coil between Kuro's shoulders. Desperate to see it banished, he sat up and leant back against the wall, fingers gently carding through Kuro's hair and smoothing the trauma-whitened forelock that was slightly longer than the rest out of his eyes. "All teams have to readjust when someone new joins or.. or drops out. And you're not going to get on with everyone here. Allura and Keith will come round eventually. Give them a little more time before you abandon us and do your own thing."

"You knew?" Kuro glanced at him, tilting his head, and Lance could only smile at that. If Kuro had thought he was being subtle with his attempt to set up a pod to leave on when they were right next to the Lion's hangars and there was more or less always either Pidge, Hunk or himself in one of them, he was badly mistaken.

"Pidge noticed first. She doesn't miss a trick, y'know." Why she'd come to Lance with the information before anyone else he had no idea, but he was grateful for it regardless. "I'm guessing you feel better if you know you have an escape route, right?"

"I... yeah. Something like that." He didn't miss the sleepiness to Kuro's voice then, or the way he was leaning into the hand softly trailing against his head having shuffled close enough to rest an arm on his legs and pull him closer, and the sight warmed Lance from the inside out so quietly he barely caught his own emotion.

"Go to sleep." Lance suggested softly, wishing not for the first time that he'd had someone to be there and do this for him in the first few terrified, lonely nights he'd spent alone in his room when they first found the castle and became aware they'd been separated from Earth for the foreseeable future, maybe forever. "You're safe here."

Kuro sighed and went still, his grip on Lance's thigh loosening as he appeared to give in to his drowsiness. A soft noise began to overlap with the distant engine sounds in the background, a rumbling that sounded not that different from what he occasionally heard from Blue when the lion was purring to try to comfort him. _Kuro was purring._

 


	5. Mirror (Part 2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mirror/Reflection - Shiro accepts the reality of having his clone on the same ship. The rest of the team is somewhat more uncomfortable.  
> As ever, find me at mystitrinqua on tumblr or twitter if you would like to scream with me about these dorks.  
> Takes place over Episodes 5-6 (Eye of the Storm & Ark of Taujeer).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I LIVE. No, seriously though. This chapter right here has been the single most difficult thing to write in a long time.  
> The entire 'Vessels' album from Starset has pretty much become my OST for this fic. :')  
> One more fluffy chapter to come before the angst starts, folks. >:) Enjoy!

Kuro jolted awake from a sleep that hadn’t come easily as a heavy booming thud from outside rocked the whole room, blindly reaching out a hand to one side in the dark. Lance wasn’t there. Of course he wasn’t… he’d seen the whole group off alongside Coran and Allura as they headed for Olkarion’s surface and then gone back to helping the Alteans with ship maintenance. That didn’t mean that he didn’t tilt his head to the left to stare forlornly at the empty spot he remembered Lance taking up a few days ago for a few seconds before vaulting out of the bed. A sound like that meant they were under fire.

Travelling to Olkarion had meant he had time to get used to being around the team but he still wasn’t used to the walking contradiction that Lance could be. Some days, he was loud and brash and playful, the centre of attention or unhappy when he wasn’t what everyone else was focused on, distracting them from their own worries with his banter. Some days, though, he avoided the others entirely on purpose, seemingly going down other less travelled corridors to avoid the main routes between their most frequented rooms in the castle. Some days he spent hours looking at the stars they were travelling past alone with a book, or training his ‘sharpshooter’ skills in one of the smaller, more specific training rooms, or just performing totally unnecessary maintenance check-ups on the Blue Lion.

He knew that Lance wasn’t all that introverted - unlike Pidge or Keith - so it wasn’t that he was avoiding people to recharge his metaphorical batteries with some quality alone time. It was just that any attempt to point out the one or two ‘quiet’ days that had happened so far tended to lead to him manoeuvring away from the topic as fast as humanly possible, especially when no one else seemed to notice them happening because they were so wrapped up in their own side projects. Aside from Keith’s occasional taunts it was the only thing that Lance rose to squash down straight away, like he wanted to make himself seem the perpetual social butterfly, always open to taking a friend’s stress alongside his own whether it was good for him or not.

Of course, Kuro knew he was no better, shutting down any conversation that strayed too close to what he had been doing before Lance found him or how he’d experienced whatever little-known culture existed on Galra ships. Or ignoring the way that the others seemed to stumble through conversations when it came to the differences between himself and Shiro and having to still acclimatise themselves to the fact that although they looked almost identical, that was where any kind of similarity stopped. Thankfully it didn’t take more than a day or two for everyone else to stop mistaking him for Shiro from a distance when they weren’t all wearing their armour sets - and especially after he’d taken to wearing plain black flight suits instead of the same kinds of earth-style clothes they did. The only person who had never made that mistake this whole time was Lance, and although he wasn’t sure why he also wasn’t going to ask him. There were bigger problems to concentrate on.

Bigger problems like the fact that the first thing he saw as he stumbled from his room was the orderly array of Galran drone fighter ships that filled the horizon outside in an advancing swarm. Zarkon’s command ship hung in the background, quietly dominating the available view for reasons that had nothing to do with it’s size, and the sight was undeniably what caused the tremors to start. It wasn’t even that this was the closest he’d ever been to the Galran emperor - Zarkon didn’t even know he existed.

_ Haggar was on that ship.  _

It was enough to make thoughts and breath short-circuit in one, his heart pounding too loudly in his ears for him to be able to think about anything else, the solid wall behind him faint to his perception as he slid down it to the floor. Haggar was right there, and if the castle’s defences didn’t hold, if they and all of the lions were captured… the only place he would go was back to her. Back to the arena, back to the laboratory with nothing to escape to, because Voltron had already been caught alongside him. This time he wasn’t the only one she’d get her hands on, either. 

Somehow, that thought was worse.

It was a strain to think about anything but the crushing feeling winding around his chest like iron, preventing him from getting a real breath in. More loud noises and shaking followed as laser fire started to strike the particle barrier and if he hadn’t been focused on just trying to breathe in for more than three seconds at a time before the panic forced the air back out of his lungs then he’d be mildly annoyed at the attempt to mess up all the hard work that the entire team had put into the maintenance on the ship over the past week.

A small circular glint caught his eye somewhere among the mental fog that had settled over him, thick and choking as it froze him against the floor. Three of the castle’s many available defense drones streaked past, a faint purple colouring the closest one, and soon the scales were being evened a little, drone fighters going up in small streaks of fire. The corridor tilted sharply and he skidded, vaguely having the presence of mind to slow himself by pressing his hands against the floor as the ship orbited a moon and rapidly increased in speed, and then all he could see was the soft blue of the wormhole spreading out to swallow them.

And just like that, they were gone. The corrupted purple shade that had been successfully confined to his nightmares was banished back there again, replaced by a blissfully open view of stars. The squeezing in his ribs was replaced with bone-deep tiredness that hit him in a wave, but he was too thankful of the ability to slow his own breaths and inch his thoughts back in a rough line. The idea of heading upstairs to find out what in the nine hells was going on crossed his mind, but he pushed it away almost as quickly given there was no way he was going to make it all the way from the sleeping quarters to the bridge without succumbing to the nausea tightening his throat.

Breathing out, he closed his eyes and braced one hand against the wall, moving on shaky feet straight back to the bed he’d woken up on. He didn’t notice the scampering in the doorway until he felt the pressure of four tiny bodies making indents on the mattress next to him and the quiet snuffling and squeaks of the mice. Although he knew they were around, he hadn’t spent that much time really thinking about them. Right now, though, they were a welcome distraction, a small smile crossing his face as all four pastel-coloured bundles of fur found their own comfortable positions cuddled against him. 

Whether it was for security or warmth, he wasn’t sure and found he really didn’t care. They weren’t going to judge the way his hands still hadn’t stopped shaking at the mere sight of a space ship. They didn’t care that he hadn’t been able to put his own fear behind him in the face of danger to everyone else onboard, that he’d been trapped on the floor of a corridor by his own body and allowed himself to become a victim.

“Must be easy for you guys, not having to worry about the big stuff.” He murmured, reaching out to gently pet the powder-blue mouse currently curled somewhere vaguely against his collarbone. There was only a small squeak of protestation when he stopped, the blue mouse apparently enjoying the attention just as much as a certain other blue-associated person in his life. The bed was warmer for their presence, and it wasn’t that long before he found the tiredness that had begun to sink into him the moment his agitated state petered out dragging him back into an uneasy sleep.

 

* * *

 

“Hey, are you awake?” Pidge’s voice over the intercom at his door was the next thing he jolted awake to, trying his best not to disturb the mice still nestled against him as he blindly patted the metal frame around the bed, looking for the panel of buttons that was nestled somewhere in the general region of his head to unlock the door so that she could come in.

“Ah.. Hi. Door’s open.”

When the door slid back Pidge didn’t look in any better shape than him, crumpled and tired and crabby, but her appearance coupled with the source of his panic attack earlier brought the one specific thing he still had that might be useful to her back to the forefront of his mind. She beat him to speaking before he could, though, cutting him short.

“You didn’t seriously sleep through the attack on the castle, did you?” Pidge seemed genuinely curious, having walked in without taking eyes off the small rectangular data-pad she’d probably wandered all the way from the bridge holding onto.

“What kind of stupid question is that? Of course I didn’t.” He couldn’t help the decided flatness despite her calm approach, not wanting to let his thoughts slide back to the sudden noise of the castle’s red alert siren, or the shadows the Galran drones had cut through the irritatingly cool blue lights emitted by every single piece of Altean technology available to interact with. That wouldn’t end well but he couldn’t help himself revisiting what he’d been doing before he was fortunate enough that he was under such stress for so long he tired himself out reacting to it. He had no control over what his mind wanted to relive just like he had no control over how his body responded to anything that threatened to drag him from the safety of the castle and deposit him back in the cell now confined only to his nightmares.

“Rude.” Pidge scoffed, not actually as offended as she sounded judging from her smile. Finally glancing up from whatever she was reading, it only took her a cursory look around to make a rough guess of exactly where Kuro had been this whole time. The room was still in darkness, which he didn’t appear to have a problem with, and the bed was a mess… and currently occupied by the mice, oddly enough. “Oh, hey, can you see in the dark? Is that why there’s no light in here?”

“I.. well, yeah. Close enough.” Kuro replied, looking like he had something else on his mind as he leant back against the wall at the head of his bed, absently putting one hand against the blue mouse on his shoulder to keep it still while he moved in what looked to be a fond gesture. He was avoiding her eyes as he stretched out his prosthetic arm though, claws unsheathing at the tips of his fingers with soft clinking sounds, and that was mildly annoying. It prevented her from being able to catalogue how he felt about the addition and compare it to Shiro’s reaction - although she had already noticed that although Shiro was very careful not to touch others with his own prosthetic and seemed to see it solely as a weapon Kuro had no such psychological hold-ups. “I had to have my DNA spliced with some Galran genes to get this thing to work. It’s different to our  _ ‘fearless leader’s.’” _

“Okay, number one: don’t be creepy. You know better than anyone he’s probably just as scared as the rest of us sometimes.” She replied, unable to help chuckling at the sarcasm that had been in the clone’s voice as he referred to Shiro that way. Yes, their Black Paladin was dependable and damn good at his job, but sometimes she thought the others forgot that he was only human and just as fallible as they were. It was nice to meet someone who shared that attitude for a change. “And secondly, how is it different?”

“Uh.. I guess you could call Shiro’s an earlier model? I was kind of left to figure it out for myself.” He replied absently, a small smirk sliding back onto his face that oddly had her more relaxed. If he was teasing her then he was getting back to normal again. “I can redirect quintessence as lightning, like the Druids. As for the rest.. no spoilers.”

Pidge would have pouted at that but she’d already expected that he wasn’t going to give up his secrets to her just yet. Not that it mattered, as he’d have to come to her sooner or later if it was based on the same model as Shiro’s own prosthetic, which required routine maintenance on a few components around the joints after fights. Although she didn’t marvel over it out loud as much as she did the other technology around the castle, the engineering that went into Galran technology was almost as seamless as that of the Alteans - and in most cases suspiciously similar. Shiro’s arm alone was enough to have her robotics-related mind ticking over for weeks just trying to figure out how it all worked so smoothly, and now she had an upgraded model to work with. The possibilities were endless.

“And you don’t get an electric shock?” Shiro and electricity were never a good mix so she didn’t have much context in which to couch thoughts of how Kuro just casually throwing lightning at people with no side-effect might work.

“Not so far.” He replied, shrugging and giving the mouse perched on his shoulder an apologetic little pet when it squeaked at the disturbance that was almost sickeningly cute for someone who was supposed to have been crafted into a cold-blooded killer sent to steal Black from them. Or whatever Allura thought he was. Over the last few days she’d found herself subscribing to that theory less and less.

“Well, hit me up when it needs maintenance.” She offered, her attention flipping back to her data-pad. “Hunk and Lance were worried about you, by the way, we were all just.. distracted.”

“I don’t think me being on the bridge would have been helpful.”

“And you panicked, didn’t you?”

“I.. No… How did you—” The rate at which he tensed up had to be some kind of speed record, and she almost felt guilty for bringing it up but it was good to have her suspicions confirmed. Verbally or not.

“—Relax, Kuro.” Trying not to feel awkward, she leant over the pet the mouse on his shoulder. “You’re still shaky and you look like shit, of course I can tell you’ve been panicking. We’ve all seen it before, remember? Dissociative episodes and the whole nine yards.”

“That doesn’t make it better.” He replied, sighing and running a hand through his hair as he shifted on the bed, looking half full of a restless energy he was carefully containing for the sake of not disturbing his tiny visitors. It wasn’t so much the fact he knew they’d seen it before and more that showing any form of weakness in front of enemies was a strict no-go. Even if he was not supposed to be seeing the rest of them as enemies any more it was taking some time for his mind to really catch up to that.

“Wasn’t intended to.” Honestly if he wanted cheerful hand-waving of issues, he could go and talk to one of the others. Pidge didn’t have time for being coddled and didn’t have the patience to do it to anyone else, especially not when they all needed to maintain rationality just to survive. If mother nature didn’t fuck around with trying to kill them then space itself was like her doubly vengeful cousin. “Someone has to remind you idiots that real life is messed up and that it’s okay to react, as long as that means fixing the shitty situations.”

“Ever the realist.”

Pidge shrugged at the sassy remark, fully willing to accept the label if Kuro felt he had to give her one.

“Picked that up from my brother. That and a  _ delightful _ array of curse words.”

“I’m sure he’s very proud.”

“He’d better be.”

Dusting herself off, Pidge turned to leave, appearing to have achieved what she came for as he broke into what small, quiet amount of laughter that he could muster in light of everything else that was out to ruin his mood that day.

“Oh, by the way, Coran has the Slipperies and Hunk’s stress-baking again. Go hunt him down if you want some weird-ass blue cookies that may or may not divest you of your teeth.”

“Slipperies?”

“Some kind of middle-aged hyper-charged sweating. Honestly I was a bit too busy being grossed out to ask anyone for more details.”

“Alright, I’ll bear it in mind.” The mice seemed to get the message, hopping off him to find comfy spots amid his ruffled sheets as he stood up. No point staying in his room when there were things to do.

“Will you be okay if.. it happens again?”

“You’re expecting them to catch up to us?” From the impression he’d gotten of the team’s ability to hide from Haggar’s spy network, he was surprised that Pidge was expecting discovery so soon. The whole reason they’d been able to hold out this long was that the Galran commanders seemed to have no idea where they were at any given time.

“Call it a hunch.” Pidge replied, her expression twisting into something decidedly more sour as she leant against the door frame, loosely crossing one bony ankle over the other. “Coran says the ship’s Teludav is pretty much a goner, too. We can’t wormhole our way out if they find us again.”

“Well, I might be able to help a little. May or may not have stolen the drone control algorithm on my way out.. thought I might need a bargaining chip or two after my first foiled escape attempt.” Her mood lifted considerably at that and Kuro couldn’t help himself smiling as he waved his metallic, clawed fingers at her teasingly. “Amazing how many terabytes of storage this thing has.”

“Sweet.” Pidge’s data-pad was thoroughly abandoned again as she tugged on his arm enthusiastically, pulling him toward the corridor. “Come on, I still want to try and learn Altean after this. There’s a training simulation for it.”

“That doesn’t sound safe, Pidge.” Every other Altean training simulator usually had laser fire or electricity involved, after all, there was no reason to expect this one would be any different. “Although I can teach you Galran, I suppose. Fair trade for the maintenance.”

“It’s a deal.”

Allowing her to take over navigating through the corridors, he followed her lead without paying much attention to the strange feeling filtering through his head the closer that they got to the Lion’s hangars. Pidge was clearly more concentrated on getting him back to her lab set up near Green than the fact that neither Shiro nor Allura thought it was a good idea that he went near the hangars at all, and watching her back was enough to let him zone out from navigating his way through the corridors and wonder what the others were doing with their free time.

 

* * *

 

After sending Pidge off on her way (despite his misgivings) to poke at the Altean language trainer, Kuro inevitably found himself wandering in the direction of the small collection of rooms he affectionately categorised as Engineering - namely, Coran’s (and occasionally Hunk’s) domain. It didn’t take more than a few hours before they had everything stabilised again, but Coran had appointed him the person to run up to the bridge and actually relay the information, having temporarily rerouted power away from the ship’s intercom and a few other non-essentials already to ensure that the Teludav had reserves to draw on if it needed them to help mete out an overload risk.

When he got there he was faced with Shiro, alone. It was awkward, standing still staring at Shiro staring back, unsure what to say, but it meant that Allura was still sleeping which could only be a good thing. He’d barely finished that thought when the door slid open behind him and the princess walked toward the central console. It didn’t even look like she’d changed her clothes let alone attempted to sleep at any point since the initial appearance of Zarkon’s fleet.

“The Teludav is partially repaired but another wormhole will stress it.” Kuro informed her, guessing from the steely expression he was met with that she wasn’t going to listen to any attempt to nag her back to bed. Not that it stopped Shiro from looking like he wanted to try. “We need to lay low a bit longer while Coran locates the nearest place we can get more lenses from.”

“Why aren’t you sleeping?” Shiro interrupted, and he couldn’t find it in himself to be annoyed when Allura went from looking outwardly determined to tired, a clear admission in her body language in response to his prodding even if she wouldn’t admit it out loud. That was interesting.

“Zarkon could be back at any moment.”

“And if that happens, we’ll need you, Princess.” Shiro caught her hand to stop her attempt to summon an information readout, sighing and settling her with an ‘I’m not mad just disappointed’ look he picked up from his own parents in a similar situation.

“I don’t think it’s a matter of  _ if.” _ Kuro grumbled tiredly, moving away from them to stare up at the projection of what could be seen outside the castle. The stars were almost concealed behind the curve of an ice ball that the castle was rested inside, but just because they were tucked away here didn’t mean they were safe. Zarkon’s pursuit of them wasn’t likely to be something that wound down any time soon.

All three of them stiffened as the castle’s alarms blared again, red lines overlaying the starry landscape as Zarkon’s ship, thankfully sans battleships this time, melted into solidity in front of their eyes. There was no way that he should have been able to find them this quickly, not unless one of them was being tracked.

“Quiznak.” He muttered, bringing a hand up to brush irritatedly through his hair. “I hate it when I’m right.”

“We are several galaxies away, how could they find us?! Unless..”

Shiro and Allura both turned to look at him as the rest of the Paladins ran in, panicked, and he stared back at them stonily. They really, really didn’t have time to do this, not now.

“You think I tipped them off.” Allura didn’t have to say it out loud for him to see it in her face, although to her credit there seemed a certain amount of upset mixed in with her misgivings that wouldn’t have been there even a few days ago. She wasn’t going out of her way to avoid him so she’d been watching him start to find his own feet with the rest of the team.

The sight of Zarkon’s ship casting a long, spiked shadow over them was enough to trigger his panic again, but he couldn’t show it, not now. Not when Allura was staring him down with the same angry look she’d interrogated him with and Shiro didn’t look interested in stopping her… or perhaps just didn’t know how bad her temper could get on the rare occasions that she lost it. He was sure he was going pale anyway, fingers clenching to fists to stop their shaking being so visible as he levelled the princess with a glare.

“It’s a possibility.” she replied, her stone-faced expression an odd sight when compared to the apologetic sheepishness of the Black Paladin behind her, who seemed to be grasping at mental straws for some way to end the verbal stand off before it could cost them more time.

“Except it’s  _ not,  _ because I’ve been with Pidge and Coran all afternoon.” Kuro replied flatly, having to take measured breaths to prevent his voice from shaking as badly as the rest of him wanted to. “Any way they could be tracking me they would have used on Shiro a long time ago, if they could, so I suggest you look elsewhere for however they found us.”

“We really don’t have time for this, you guys.” It was Lance that walked over, frowning as he put himself between Allura and Kuro. It looked like Pidge had been able to take control of the drones with the algorithm that Kuro had given her, which left Lance and Keith with little to do while Hunk and Pidge kept a close eye on the various readouts given by the castle. “Kuro’s just at much at risk as we are, here. He isn’t in any rush to go back to Haggar.”  _ And neither am I, _ Lance didn’t say, but he could hear it in the brunet’s voice anyway and returned the soft smile that Lance gave him as best he could as he allowed himself to be chivvied across the room away from the conversation. If Allura wanted to attempt any more crazy manoeuvres he’d need something to hang onto again and he’d rather be within grabbing range of someone who didn’t think he was going to betray the location of the only safe haven that he had.

“You’re right, Lance.” Shiro replied, his expression suggesting he wasn’t dropping the pending conversation in the long term but was willing to delay it. They had to figure out how Zarkon was tracking them even if it wasn’t through Kuro. “Now isn’t the time, we should be working together.”

“Yes.” Allura nodded, taking her spot at the central console as she refocused her attention on Zarkon’s ship. He hadn’t been expecting the apology and it helped. Seeing her shift her attention helped. Just being on the bridge, surrounded by other people all focused on the same goal of getting away from the danger posed by the Galran ship helped dull his panic to a quiet roaring that was much easier to shove to the back of his mind than it ever had been when he was alone. “There are more important things to do.”

 

* * *

 

When all of the Paladins chose to spend their night slumped in their customary spots on the communal sofas watching the few films Pidge had brought with her from Earth, luckily just having them around on a flash drive, it wasn’t like Kuro could find it in himself to blame any of them. Hunk’s teeth-breaking scaultrite cookies had saved the day in the end but only after they were nearly all fried crispy inside the Teludav, and that was an eventful enough experience on it’s own without playing cat and mouse with Zarkon’s command fleet or trying to hide in whatever weird planetary storm they’d managed to stumble across.

After ensuring that Allura had actually gone to bed this time, Coran was still essentially reduced to a pair of legs sticking out of the cylindrical opening of the Teludav while he poked around and fixed what he could, requesting instruments with increasingly bizarre names one after the other that Kuro handed to him with a quizzical look.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather be with the Paladins?” It was the third time he’d been asked (although the other attempts had been slightly less straightforward) and his answer hadn’t changed.

“I’m sure, Coran. They don’t need me there.” he replied, sighing. He should at least make sure they had eaten something as he knew Hunk hadn’t been near the kitchens since everything quietened down, given they were within earshot of the hallway that also led to the ship’s cafeteria. “It’s not like I risked anything or had to expend the energy of piloting this whole ship or of forming Voltron today, that was all  _ them _ . I haven’t done anything to be rewarded with time off for.”

“The simple act of having time to relax with friends shouldn’t be a reward you keep from yourself, young man.” Coran would have sounded stern if his voice wasn’t being oddly reflected thanks to the curious acoustics of the Teludav. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed the fact you spend your time doing repairs as an excuse to isolate yourself from the group activities going on around you.”

“I’m not one of them.” Kuro pointed out, not intending the admission to come out as acidic as it did. “Group activities are generally for people who are actually  _ part _ of the group.” Honestly he sometimes thought Coran forgot that he wasn’t a Paladin. He wasn’t a pilot, even though he trained for it enough, given he didn’t have a ship. As far as the Galra were concerned he was probably nothing special either if you discounted the fact they only ever had one of him.

“That doesn’t appear to be how  _ they _ feel.” Coran replied cheerily, ignoring the defeated sigh he could hear from the outside of the Teludav. He might not have been a hundred percent sure of what he was saying but it was the kind of thing that Kuro needed because he was far too much like Keith and Lance both. He didn’t come for advice, but he took to a little prodding in the right direction quite well as long as it was subtle enough. “Besides, they could use some snacks and as it so happens, nothing here is preventing you from joining them.”

He slid out of the mouth of the Teludav just long enough to hold Kuro’s eyes with a knowing look, taking in the insecurity and tension he saw there and returning nothing but calm expectancy until Kuro silently admitted defeat, sighing and turning away to set down the scanner in his hand that he’d been expecting Coran to ask for next.

“Are you sure I can’t stay here?”

“I’m sure. I’m not saying you have to do anything, it’s hard when you feel like an outsider.” Feeling a hand pat his shoulder, Kuro didn’t have the will to shrug him off, resigning himself to at least giving himself the chance. It hadn’t struck him until now that despite the fond camaraderie he probably wasn’t the only one who felt like he stood awkwardly outside of the central team formed by Allura and her Paladins. “I’m saying give them a chance to prove you wrong. These stabilising repairs shouldn’t take much longer anyway.”

“..alright, fine. I guess it’s the least I can do.”

“That’s the spirit!” Turning back to the Teludav, Coran shooed him off with a wave of the hand before climbing back inside, and Kuro shook his head, vaguely despairing at the whole situation.

When Kuro arrived in one of the smaller common rooms as directed, it was with a small cooler box tucked under one shoulder and no small amount of unrest in his mind. He still felt hollowed out from the panic that had exhausted him that morning despite attempting to sleep it off, and seeing the rest of them form Voltron with his own eyes for the first time in order to try and fight off Zarkon’s fleet had been both a humbling experience and one that filled him with dread. The universe’s greatest weapon was huge and the fact that Haggar had intended him to replace Shiro as lead pilot for it was even more laughable now than it had been initially. Laughable and oddly terrifying. Never mind the thought of co-ordinating four other pilots and their lions to work as a team.

All five Paladins were in front of a large, floating screen with the lights off, watching some vaguely ironic sci-fi film about tripod-like aliens invading earth and destroying major cities with heat rays. They were mostly hidden under a mass of fluffy blue blankets and pillows, spaced around the square perimeter of the large sofas that dominated the wide open space of the room. As to be expected Shiro and Keith were bunched together in one corner and Pidge and Lance were an awkward sibling-like tangle of limbs in the middle between them and Hunk.

Perching silently on the end of the sofas furthest away from Shiro and Keith, he opted to remain quiet for the moment as he didn’t really want to disturb them as they all looked very comfy and at least passably invested in whatever the film was. He’d gotten through half a packet of some weird blue-green crunchy things that tasted like popcorn when Hunk happened to glance around and caught the yellow gleam of his eyes reflecting the screen light. There was a moment or two of silence before he yelped in surprise, scooting back into Pidge and Lance and disturbing the blankets and pillows as he went, one hand pressed to his chest.

_ “What the—?!” _

“Relax, Hunk, it’s just a film.” Kuro, nonplussed, offered him the cooler, several flavoured drink pouches and more blue popcorn substitute packets stored inside along with some dried fruit of unknown origin that he was certainly not braving. “Also, Coran sends supplies.”

“Wh.. I just.. buddy.. please never do that again, you almost gave me a heart attack.”

“Holy shit, he got you good.” Pidge was amused, judging from her cackling, which he supposed had to count for something. “Nice.”

“Wha? Oh, snacks! I call dibs.” Lance was the first to make a break for the cooler, Pidge looking from Hunk’s slow recovery to Lance’s instant bounce back, evidently wondering when he’d managed to silently creep up on them while the Blue Paladin broke down into giggles and patted Hunk’s shoulder in sympathy.

“Sorry, Hunk.”

“It’s okay.” Hunk still looked unsettled, and Kuro could read that well enough, shuffling back a little to give him more space even though they had a cooler between them. He went for his own bag of popcorn, waving it at Kuro with a grateful smile in an attempt at a peace offering. “I can forgive you if you brought snacks. Scary movie night just isn’t a good time to creep up on me, y’know?”

Feeling a little more welcomed at that, especially when he knew Hunk could easily have gotten a lot more unsettled than he did, Kuro chuckled.

“I’ll keep it in mind. What are you even watching?”

“Oh, this? It’s Lance’s pick. Some cheesy old action film with aliens.” Keith piped up, smirking over at them. “Not like we don’t already have enough aliens out for our blood, we have to spend our time watching films about them too.”

“Hey, shove off, mullet.” Lance shot back, no real venom to his tone as he watched Shiro and Keith curl a little closer to each other under the blankets like they were trying to be subtle with their cuddling and resisting the urge to roll his eyes. He appreciated that they weren’t trying to shove their relationship in anyone else’s face but that didn’t make it any easier to deal with. “I don’t question you for making us sit through that whole series of  _ Fast and Furious _ films.”

“Whatever.”

No one questioned it when it took Lance all of five minutes before he moved, disentangling himself from his blanket cocoon and hopping over the back of the sofa so that he could set the cooler on the floor and place himself between Hunk and Kuro. It was weird to look at, really, like having two Shiro-shaped bookends to their little group, but Kuro was warm and didn’t move away when Lance got comfortable leaning against him so that was something. Thankfully the dark kept the heat on his face from being too obvious and if anyone called him out on it later he could just make up some excuse about making sure Kuro stayed. The clone was barely paying attention to the film, his eyes on the blankets and occasionally flicking to the door and back as though he felt like he didn’t belong, and Lance wanted to make sure that particular emotion was banished and never came back.

“You guys were really brave out there today.” Kuro definitely wasn’t focused on the film, taking advantage of the fact that Lance’s head was practically rested against his shoulder to lean down and talk to him quietly enough to keep the conversation between them under the radar of the others thanks to the noise from the screen. “And thanks.. for earlier. With Allura. I didn’t get the chance to really say it before.”

“Oh, that? No problem.” It was times like this that he was amused that Lance forgot he could actually see in the dark, getting to watch the heat rising up the back of Lance’s neck and ears as he went still against Kuro’s chest, letting out a shaky, flustered chuckle. “It’s… it’s cool. No big thing.” 

“It is to me, Lance. It’s not like I’m used to people rushing to my rescue and you’ve done it twice now.”

“Anyone would have.” Lance replied, trying desperately to calm the thunder of his pulse rushing in his ears as it felt like Kuro got just that little bit closer to him, his small sigh sending a gust of heated breath across Lance’s neck that made him shiver.

“I’m not so sure. You do a lot more for people than you seem to notice.” _ You or anyone else on this ship, _ Kuro didn’t say, trying not to frown at the thought of it. Even now he wasn’t an idiot and knew exactly why Lance had made a point of coming over and resting against him so that he couldn’t leave without disturbing him, knowing that he wouldn’t leave if it meant disrupting anyone else’s comfort to do it like the low-key schemer that he was. “But that doesn’t mean it slips past everyone.”

Lance let out an unconvinced huff and pressed himself tighter against Kuro’s chest, shutting him up by stealing one of his arms and bringing it loosely around his waist so that he could get back some of the comfort he’d had cuddled against Pidge’s small but oddly warm body.

“Yeah, yeah. Just pass me some popcorn, dork.”

The film ended almost an hour later but was rapidly followed by another two, and Lance spent the entire time curled up against Kuro’s side resolutely ignoring the way that Hunk and Pidge caught each other’s eyes with conspiratorial and decidedly smug looks. They were getting progressively more tired, though, and Keith was actually the first person to fall asleep for a change, resting his face against Shiro’s neck to block his eyes from the light of the screen. Somewhere between Hunk drifting off curled between a pillow and the cooler and Shiro  _ ‘resting his eyes for a minute’  _ during a long scene of dialogue, Kuro wiggled out from under Lance and slipped off the side of the sofa so that he could move around without disturbing the others as he turned the screen off and plunged the room into a deeper layer of darkness that made Lance admit to himself that okay, maybe he was tired too. He couldn’t really remember the last ten minutes of what he’d just watched and the blankets around him were still warm with their shared body-heat even though they were thin.

“M’gonna head off, double-check that Coran’s not still halfway inside that Teludav.” It was a paper-thin excuse and Lance saw through it in an instant but he couldn’t do much except glare at Kuro balefully, blinking at his half shadowed outline caught in the low light of the hallway. “He has to sleep some time.”

“He can take care of himself.” Lance replied, pouting sleepily as he resisted the urge to hold up his hands and make grabbing motions in Kuro’s general direction, his tired brain wanting his human space heater back. “Come sleep with m-us.” He caught himself at the last second but the small, sleepy titter he heard from Pidge told him the damage was already done, there. He was too tired to do anything but label that tomorrow’s problem. “Come sleep with us. You belong here, too.”

“Maybe some other time, Lance.” Kuro replied, glancing down the hallway and using the removal of eye contact as a bid to persuade Lance to disengage from the conversation. “You guys need the rest more than me.”

“Hm, fine. You do you, my dude.” Lance murmured, rolling over and getting comfortable in his previous position half squished between Hunk and Pidge, both of whom were by now completely out for the count, Pidge’s glasses slipping off her face with a clatter as she rolled over and tucked herself against Lance’s side. Kuro’s saddened smile before he turned and walked off played across his mind but ultimately, sleep was always going to be the victor in this fight. None of them had got the chance to so much as nap in-between arriving at Olkarion and now  _ (Okay, he’d had the chance, but he went to the pool instead. Stupid Altean pools.)  _ and he needed it.

 

_ “You’re changing the subject, Lance. You could have left me here and you didn’t. Why?” _

_ He blinked, glancing around to avoid Kuro’s eyes as he took in the half-dark cell. He didn’t remember what had led him to this specific moment, but it was here. Deja-vu wasn’t quite the word to describe what he was feeling but it was hard to think with Kuro in such close proximity. _

_ “I…ah…” Clumsy words tumbled out of his mouth as he opened it but stringing together a thought that wasn’t  _ **_holy shit he’s close_ ** _ was too much of an ask to expect himself to do right now. _

_ “You must have had a reason, so tell me.” Kuro seemed happy to wait, practically purring with amusement as he filled Lance’s field of vision entirely, looming above him with arms resting against the cool metal wall at his back to trap him in the small space. _

_ “Do I really?” _

_ It was a transparent attempt to buy himself more time. He knew it and Kuro knew it too, evidently, the playful smirk on his face only widening at Lance’s words. _

_ “There’s no such thing as a free lunch, Lance.” He taunted, an appreciative hum leaving him at the way the blue-eyed boy’s breath hitched as claws traced the column of his neck, delicate tanned skin flushed with red and begging to be marked. “Everyone has their reasons to do good things for other people.” _

_ Instead of their first painful interaction from the arena, this time Kuro took the air from his lungs as their mouths met, his face tilted up in a gentle grip as he felt the claws he’d just been teasingly threatened with retract. _

_ It was brief, chaste and uncharacteristically shy for both of them, but Kuro’s smile was the same warm look of affection he’d seen before on a different but familiar face. _

_ “Lance?!” His gaze flicked sharply to the side and then his eyes widened, seeing Shiro standing outside the cell. The door was open, bars nowhere to be seen, but he stayed at the threshold as if he was some spectre waiting to be invited in and powerless to act. Betrayal and uncertainty twisted the disapproval in his gaze, as if thinking about him in this context had summoned him to give all of Lance’s anxieties a voice that they knew he couldn’t say no to. “Is this.. really what you want? Do you resent me this much?” _

_ “I should have known.” Just like that his attention was recaptured, turning away from Shiro to see the previously affectionate look on Kuro’s face replaced with one of hurt and self doubt. “I should have known  _ **_he’d_ ** _ be the reason you wanted anything to do with me.” _

_ His heart twisted painfully at the saddened expression that had replaced the warmth in those golden eyes. The world felt blurry at the edges, suddenly, everything moving too fast and ripped out of his control to change. _

_ “No—” _

_ “—I guess I’m not good enough next to him, even for you.” Another twist of the knife, another second of seeing his own anxiety refracting into Kuro’s expression was more than he could stand. _

_ “No, Kuro. Listen—” he stalled as Kuro refused to hold his eye and then frowned, throwing caution to the wind as he raised his hands, desperate to re-establish the contact that Kuro had allowed to end when Lance’s attention shifted away from him. Resting his fingers gently against Kuro’s face he pulled, forcing him to look up and hold his gaze again. “I know what it’s like to never be good enough and you’re not that. You’ll never be that, not to me.” _

_ Shiro had been the ideal, the publicly lauded hero pilot that drove his dedication to the Garrison as a vehicle to the stars above all the other, cheaper places he could have chosen to study at… but trying to reach him, even now when he was on the same team and close enough to touch, was still like trying to touch those stars. He was never going to come any closer and Lance was losing the will to keep silently reaching for him. Especially when Kuro was right here, kissing him again, the press of their lips heated and deepened now as Lance heard his name murmured to him in desperation. _

_ All bets were off, then, hands mapping familiar planes of skin and memorising their angles in completely new ways as he felt himself pulled flat against Kuro’s front and allowed himself the freedom to slide his fingers against his spine, entirely too pleased with himself when Kuro arched into the touch. A stolen glance at the cell doorway showed it empty, the glimpse of Shiro that he’d somehow conjured for himself banished and all his doubts about whether this was the right thing or not gone with it. He knew what he wanted, now. _

 

The details of the dream were scant and already slipping when Lance lurched back into the waking world, rapidly sitting up. The sadness in the voice of whatever version of Shiro his brain had conjured asking 'do you resent me' fought for his attention against the rush he'd felt when he decided what he wanted and acted to get it, ignoring the consequences in a way he never normally would in the waking world, and it felt odd.

Both emotions were lost under the sight of his hands shaking, and he clutched at the denim covering his knees. Fear had been almost as constant a companion to his mind as Blue was since all of this started, but this was a whole new kind of fear. When it came to making bonds with other people, he knew he wasn't one for doing anything by half measures. Keith was either his rival or his partner in crime. Pidge was either a stranger or practically a sibling. Kuro was either a mortal threat and someone he should be keeping as distant from him as possible, or... 

He wasn't going to finish that thought. He wasn't  _ ready _ to finish that thought. None of the few short relationships he'd had before they went MIA from the garrison had lasted but while they did, his lovers had been the centre of his world, teenage fling or not. Every time one of them left him they took their piece of his centre away from him, and Kuro would do the same if Lance allowed him to. 

He could hope that all he was feeling was empathy but he knew himself too well to pretend that he didn't fall harder and faster than cold logic could undo when he did fall for someone. Given the sorry state of that dream, he was already long since over the cliff edge, and was just going to have to pray that the landing didn't hurt.

Glancing over the rest of the group, the warm familiarity of seeing his new 'space family' sleeping comfortably after they'd all been so stressed trying to get out from under Zarkon easily chased off his fear. Keith and Allura were both missing from the complete picture now, though, and the gaps in the cuddle-pile where they could have been were jarring. Still, Keith had probably just headed to the training deck to run through whatever it was that he drilled in there every morning. It had occurred to him that Keith and Shiro had the right idea with all their combat  training, but he didn't want to interrupt one of the few times they got to spend exclusively with each other outside of their quarters, especially not now.

Sighing, he flopped back down against the mess of large, flat pillows they’d put on the floor and curled over on his side, trying to settle himself enough to go back to sleep. If he was lucky, he wouldn’t dream again.

 

* * *

 

When Kuro returned to the loose cluster of rooms where Coran co-ordinated all the ship’s maintenance, he found it empty and dark. It should have been comforting as it meant that the Altean had admitted defeat and gone to bed like the rest of them, but it wasn’t. Being alone was comfortable, but being alone and in the dark around inactive machines of mostly unknown function wasn’t a good idea. Too much like the laboratories his nightmares still dragged him back to.

It gave him too much time to think about what he should have been doing instead. Too much time to think about Lance, and the way that he’d untangled himself from Hunk and Pidge specifically to be closer to him. It wasn’t what he was used to, and he had no idea what to make of it. Or the fact that he hadn’t missed the other two watching them and snickering. If anyone knew Lance it was Hunk and Pidge at this point and their amusement wasn’t something he was sure whether to categorise as useful or unsettling. Turning a corner to stroll past the door to the various hangar bays, he caught the sight of a familiar face who looked distinctly like he didn’t want to be caught when it was still far too early for the Paladins to be awake yet.

“Going somewhere, Keith?” He didn't have to hear the small sigh of frustration that came from the Red Paladin to see it the way his shoulders hunched. The way he refused to meet his eye as he hitched the rucksack he was carrying a little bit higher again, where his surprise discovery had made the arm holding it droop. “Shiro’s going to wonder what he’s done wrong.”

“Don’t bring him into this.” Keith shot back. “They’re tracking us  _ somehow _ and we’ve got to narrow it down before they find us again. I’m just… removing a variable.”

“You’re being rash.” And many other things besides, but it wasn’t Kuro’s place to bring up things that weren’t his to say. A few well chosen words would knock Keith enough to make him reconsider leaving but Keith’s intuition had never served them poorly in the past. Arguably it was a large part of how Lance had found Blue and got them all out here to the castle and the Alteans in the first place. “If the Galra find you out there alone they’re not going to hold back. Red will be back on a ship exactly where you found her soon enough, if they have their way.”

“Red’s not coming with me.” He was still being short, closed off now with his arms tightly crossed as the rest of his body tilted away from the conversation, and the thought of Keith out there on his own without his lion was even stupider than the thought of him with her and able to defend himself adequately enough to get back to them. “I’m leaving her here. You can find a new Paladin until we know for sure it’s not me Zarkon’s tracking.”

“So you really are running? After you spent a whole year waiting in some shack in a desert, after finally finding yourself a home and a family and all the things that are important.. you’re just running away?!”

It was hard to disassociate himself from the memory of Keith rescuing Shiro. Of how Shiro had felt, still teetering on unconsciousness after struggling to get back to his home planet, so tired but so relieved to see Keith. And now Keith was turning his back on that relief, sneaking off in the night while Shiro was sleeping and unable to offer any input or talk him out of it. It was an odd feeling, to suddenly be protective of the person he’d spent months hating. “Is it because Shiro wants you lead Voltron?”

“It’s not like—how did you—look, that’s  _ not the point!” _ Keith hissed, throwing his hands up in a gesture of abject disgust for the conversation and turning to leave again.

“I know because he told me.” Kuro replied, setting a hand on Keith’s shoulder. “I told him you weren’t ready. I told him you’d be too upset at losing him to even think about it, and if you walk away now you’re just proving me right. Stay and talk to him first, before you storm off into the night on your own and die like an idiot.”

“You’re spending too much time around Pidge.” Keith’s tone was weaker, now, and evidently bringing up everything that he was walking away from had been the right thing to remind him of. “But you still don’t understand. I have a home and a family now, yes. And I have to protect them, however I can.”

It was only then that Kuro could pinpoint what Shiro so often saw in the teen in front of him. The sadness in his eyes balancing against the firm, determined set to his jaw and the squaring of his posture. Unlike so many of Keith’s other decisions this wasn’t a rash one in the slightest, and it wasn’t fuelled by frustration - at least, not the fast burning kind Keith was prone to. He’d probably been turning this over in his head for a while and was just using this excuse while it was still credible - the something he was running from wasn’t necessarily as simple the thought of being tracked at all. He’d planned this, and every square inch of the way he was staring Kuro down suggested he wasn’t going to be swayed from his course. Or from protecting the rest of the Paladins, by him or anything else he could bring up to try and persuade Keith to stay.

He wasn’t ready yet, but when he  _ was…  _ well. That would be when things really got interesting.

“Alright. I won’t say anything else.” He knew when he was beaten, stepping aside to allow Keith to pass him on his way towards the hangars full of small pods that was directly down the hall from the lions. “Just.. don’t get caught. Physically escaping the Galra once they’ve got to you doesn’t mean you’ll ever be free of the damage they can cause to your head.”

“You’d know that better than most of us.” Keith replied, settling again as he adjusted his rucksack once more. He looked sheepish, like he’d never expected Kuro to stop arguing with him but wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth and shuffling awkwardly for a moment or two. “Thank you. Keep them safe for me.”

“Keep  _ yourself _ safe for them.” He might not have had the best start with Keith but it felt like they’d reached something approaching a truce, now, and he deflated slightly at the thought of the damage control he and Coran were going to have to run tomorrow to keep everyone on track and restart any necessary repairs to the ship after that prolonged chase with Zarkon’s fleet. “They’ll miss you, Keith.”

“Yeah..”

Their conversation ending as abruptly as it had started, Kuro fell silent and watched as Keith moved past him, looking decidedly less settled than he had before. He just had to hope that it would be enough to at least bring Keith back even if he couldn’t talk him out of leaving, continuing down the hallway in the direction of his room just in time to miss Allura rounding the corner behind him with an unsettled look on her face that was more or less a perfect match for Keith’s.


End file.
